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The world’s first, full-service conservative Internet broadcast networkFri, 09 Dec 2016 17:41:21 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.6.116302432The fight over gay marriage in Australia is close to being derailedhttp://hotair.com/archives/2016/10/12/fight-gay-marriage-australia-close-derailed/
Wed, 12 Oct 2016 12:01:53 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=3926474There’s something peculiar going on down under in the debate over same-sex marriage. The short version of the story seems to be that it’s not happening… or at least it’s looking increasingly unlikely. The long version gets a bit more interesting because it seems to be a very close parallel to what was happening in the United States six to eight years ago. There’s been a push to have a national vote on the subject take place for a while now, but all indications from their legislative body are that a referendum won’t happen and any legislative vote will be pushed back, perhaps for years. (Reuters)

Same-sex marriage will likely be delayed for at least three years in Australia after the opposition Labor party said on Tuesday it would not support a national vote, dealing another potential blow to Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull.

Australia’s center-right coalition government introduced legislation to parliament last month to hold a public vote in February 2017 on whether to legalize same-sex unions.

The bill required the support of some opposition lawmakers because Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull’s Liberal-National coalition has only a one-vote majority in the lower house of parliament and does not have a majority in the upper house.

The Aussies apparently have two paths to legalization, since they also seem to feel that it’s the government’s job to approve who can or can’t get married. One method would be a national referendum or plebiscite among the entire voting population. That’s the approach favored by the Liberal-National coalition which supports Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull. The more conservative, center right coalition, which has gained the support of the Labor party, wants to see gay marriage legalized only if it’s passed by the Parliament.

Therein lies the problem for the same sex marriage advocates. If they could have gotten the plebiscite passed the vote might have come as soon as February, and polling indicates more than 60% support for gay marriage around the country. But Turnbull is indicating that, failing that effort, there won’t be a vote in Parliament until after the next general elections which may not take place until the end of 2019. As you might imagine, advocates aren’t particularly pleased with that long of a delay.

Turnbull is constantly at odds with Labor and a multitude of critics. When you check in with Australian news there seems to be daily wrangling over everything to do with the man. There have been recent editorials criticizing him for continuing to live in his own mansion rather than the state provided lodgings which the Prime Minister normally inhabits. (Critics say his mansion isn’t set up for normal security details and he’s endangering everyone by staying in a non-secure location.) The Labor party also wants Australia to take a more confrontational stance with China and challenge them over their artificial islands in the South China Sea. Turnbull has rejected that idea also and is in a running battle with them over it.

For those of you here in the United States, is any of this sounding eerily familiar yet? Perhaps we’re not separated by much more than a common language after all.

]]>3926474Bryan Adams cancels Mississippi concert over new “anti-gay” law after playing Egypt last monthhttp://hotair.com/archives/2016/04/12/bryan-adams-cancels-mississippi-concert-over-new-anti-gay-law-after-playing-egypt-last-month/
Tue, 12 Apr 2016 19:21:04 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=3900830For the benefit of younger readers wondering, “Who’s Bryan Adams?”, he had some hits before you were born. Ask mom and dad.

I missed this yesterday but BizPac Review, along with various conservative tweeters, were all over it. This is the right way to counter celebrity boycotts, I think. They have every right to withhold services due to a deep moral objection (unlike, say, the average Christian baker being asked to cater a gay wedding in many states), but if they’re going to make a show of conscience, let’s at least test whether that objection is principled or mere virtue-signaling.

Adams, who was set to perform on Thursday at the Mississippi Coast Coliseum in Biloxi, called the state’s measure “extremely discriminatory.”

“I cannot in good conscience perform in a state where certain people are being denied their civil rights due to their sexual orientation,” Adams wrote on his website.

The law signed in Mississippi last week allows people with religious objections to deny wedding services to same-sex couples and permits employers to cite religion in determining workplace policies on dress code, grooming and bathroom and locker access.

This guy toured Egypt just last month and his biggest complaint at the time was that customs officials scribbled on one of his vintage guitars. Being gay isn’t technically illegal there but it is, after all, a Muslim country so gays are arrested on euphemistic charges like “debauchery.” Punishment can be harsh too: The CNN story at the last link mentions one sentence of 12 years. Egyptian police are known to pose as gay men and women on gay dating apps like Grindr to try to entrap locals; humiliations like anal probes also aren’t unheard of during arrests. The dark irony, per this Independent story on persecution of gays in Egypt, is that “secular” regimes like Mubarak’s and Sissi’s have cracked down harder than the Muslim Brotherhood did during the brief period a few years ago when they ruled the country. The reason is politics: Because the secularists are forever under suspicion of being “un-Islamic” compared to the Islamists, they try to prove their piety to Egyptians by making an example of gays. You would think all of this would weigh heavily on a right-thinking pro-gay bro like Bryan Adams, but like I say, either he didn’t care or didn’t care to know. How come? It’s strange, unless his Mississippi boycott is nothing more than moral peacocking.

Either his consciousness about gay rights was raised only very recently or Adams is less concerned with draconian persecution of gays abroad than with the off-chance that someone who wants a devout Christian to photograph their gay wedding might not be able to force them to do so. You could try to defend the double standard, I guess, by claiming that Adams’s boycott might have some small modicum of influence over public opinion here whereas a boycott of Muslim states would have none whatsoever, but that argument doesn’t fly. For one thing, a sincere moral objection — “I cannot in good conscience” — doesn’t depend on whether your objection moves others. It’s a statement of where you, personally, draw the line. If Adams is bothered by the persecution of gays, he should find the thought of playing Egypt more repugnant than playing Mississippi. But it’s also not true that even a has-been like Adams has zero influence over how foreigners behave. If he made a show of boycotting Muslim countries for their treatment of gays, some Americans would pay attention. That would put public pressure on better-known stars to start practicing what they preach too. A broader boycott by American entertainment, depending of course on how broad it is, would at least give the powers that be something to think about. Adams boycotting Egypt surely would have been more influential long-term in raising awareness of how gays are treated in less liberal nations than his “who cares?” boycott of Mississippi will. When push came to shove, though, he held the third world to a different moral standard than the first. Reactionaries abroad should thank him.

Oh, in case you’re wondering about Bruce Springsteen, who canceled a concert in North Carolina because he objects to their law about public bathrooms and transgendered people, turns out Bruce has stuck to the U.S., western Europe, and Australia in his last seven years of touring. Better get those European concerns in now while he can, though. The way they’re headed, they might need a celebrity boycott soon too.

]]>3900830Marco Rubio on gay marriage: It’s not “settled law,” it’s current lawhttp://hotair.com/archives/2015/11/27/marco-rubio-on-gay-marriage-its-not-settled-law-its-current-law/
http://hotair.com/archives/2015/11/27/marco-rubio-on-gay-marriage-its-not-settled-law-its-current-law/#commentsFri, 27 Nov 2015 16:01:32 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=3885377This won’t edge him past Cruz for the coveted Bob Vander Plaats endorsement in Iowa but it’ll help clean up a small mess he’s made for himself among social conservatives on gay marriage. Remember how Rubio reacted the day after the Supreme Court’s ruling on SSM came down, when loud-and-proud evangelicals like Huckabee slammed the Court for making law and called on Christians to practice civil disbodience? Quote: “While I disagree with this decision, we live in a republic and must abide by the law.” Well, okay, you say, but that’s not inconsistent with his point about settled law versus current law. We must abide by the law — but only until we can change it. In fact, the very next sentence of Rubio’s statement that day said that appointing originalist judges must be a priority for the next president, an obvious hint at overturning the decision.

“If you live in a society where the government creates an avenue and a way for you to peacefully change the law, then you’re called on to participate in that process to try to change it, not ignoring it, but trying to change the law.

“I continue to believe that marriage law should be between one man and one woman, and that the proper place for that to be decided is at the state level, where marriage has always been regulated, not by the U.S. Supreme Court, and not by the federal government.”

In that case, how come Rubio opposes a constitutional amendment that would overturn the Obergefell decision and restore state supremacy over marriage law, exactly what he seems to recommend here? His opposition to an amendment seemed mystifying to me when he announced it in July — if you’re willing to appoint justices who’ll overturn the decision, why aren’t you willing to overturn it democratically? — and seems even more so today, especially with Ted Cruz shaping up to be one of Rubio’s most imposing rivals for the nomination. Cruz not only proposed an amendment like that, he went the extra mile for social conservatives and proposed a second amendment that would create judicial retention elections for the Court’s justices, an effort to make them more mindful of majority opinion when they rule. Neither amendment will pass, but they’re no-brainers for a conservative candidate looking to impress voters in a Republican primary. As it is, it’s only a matter of time before Team Cruz starts pounding Rubio for opposing the amendment.

The only explanation I can come up with for why Rubio opposed it in July and seems more open to the idea today is that the presidential politics have changed. This summer, he was still competing for the endorsement of big-bucks donors like Paul Singer, who supports gay marriage. If Rubio had gone full Huckabee or Cruz against the Obergefell decision, that might have tipped Singer towards Jeb Bush. Now that he’s locked up Singer’s endorsement, though, and with the donor class panicked over Trump’s stubborn polling and Ted Cruz’s surge, he figures he has carte blanche from his backers to make some compromises, at least rhetorically, with the right in the name of winning the nomination. It’s immigration reform all over again: Having showed big donors that he’d govern like a “reasonable” centrist Republican on one of their pet issues by joining the Gang of Eight, he’s now free-ish to tack right by insisting that security must come first and that comprehensive reform won’t work — at least right now. His donors aren’t going to be such sticklers for centrist orthodoxy that they’ll stop Rubio from pandering a bit in the name of competing in more conservative states like Iowa. I hope someone asks him again soon if he’s reconsidered his support for an amendment to let the states take over gay marriage. I bet he’ll say yes this time, which will be an … interesting gloss on him smacking Cruz for supposedly having changed his mind on legalizing illegals.

In lieu of an exit question, read Betsy Woodruff’s piece last week about Team Rubio trying to balance its pro-SSM elements like Singer with its anti-SSM evangelical outreach.

I’m in Iowa — the heartland of America. Earlier today, I sat down with Presidential hopeful Marco Rubio. I asked him about same-sex marriage being so-called "settled law.” He had some interesting things to say about the moral conflict many Christians face when the Bible commands to obey civil authorities but also the overlying mandate to follow God’s law. What do you think of what Rubio had to say? Watch below. We'll have much more on this next week AFTER THANKSGIVING on The 700 Club. This is just a little taste of what's to come.

Since the Supreme Court’s national mandate on gay marriage there has been plenty of partying going on in the rainbow coalition, but the good times may be coming to an end for some couples. Federal employees in same sex domestic partnerships (read: what we used to call “living together in sin” for traditional couples) will no longer be able to get health insurance for their partner’s children unless they “put a ring on it.” (Washington Post)

The Obama administration reversed a policy Monday that had allowed unmarried federal employees and retirees in same-sex domestic partnerships to obtain insurance coverage for children of their partners under certain conditions.

The change, applying to the separate insurance programs for health care and for vision and dental care, is a fallout of the June U.S. Supreme Court decision requiring all states to allow and recognize same-sex marriage. It overturns a policy that itself was a result of a ruling by the high court two years earlier and could be a harbinger of other changes in eligibility for federal employee benefits.

This was a policy that had been in place since the 2013 Supreme Court decision in U.S. v. Windsor, where it was ruled that since federal employees could not have their marriage (or partnership) officially recognized, they were being denied the same employee benefits of traditional married couples. But now that those conditions no longer exist, the old rules which always applied to married couples now cover anyone. If a man and woman had a child they couldn’t get full health insurance benefits for the non-employee’s children unless they got hitched, so now that will apply to everyone again.

I wasn’t one of the people fighting against the idea of gay marriage (just the idea of the government being involved in it) but I used to joke with some of my friends that I wasn’t in favor of gay marriage but I was really big on the idea of gay divorce. The basic punchline there was that gay couples had been getting off far too easy in the past when they broke up and should be able to enjoy alimony and division of property court battles like the rest of us. This is a bit more serious of a topic, but it clearly falls on the right side of the scale in terms of equality needing to go in both directions. If a man and a woman have to be married to obtain certain benefits, why should two men or two women be able to just shack up and get them?

This decision might bring up a raft of other rights and benefits issues now that I think about it. Prior to same sex marriage becoming the law of the land there were a number of cases going through the courts regarding things like visitation rights in hospitals. There were several of these cases, such as Langbehn v. Jackson in Florida, where hospitals were allowed to have policies restricting patient visitation to immediate family, including spouses and children. When one partner in a gay couple was admitted, the other partner and their children (if they were the biological offspring of the non-hospitalized partner) were not permitted entry or access to medical information. Adjustments had to be made for gay couples, but now that gay marriage is the law of the land, will the partners be told to “put a ring on it” if they want to get in to visit? And if not… why?

This is a legal question more than a moral one and I think people deserve to expect some consistency. If a dating, heterosexual couple can have the boyfriend barred from the girlfriend’s hospital room (even if they live together, have kids, etc.) then why would we bend the rules for another unmarried couple simply because they happen to be of the same gender? This may turn out to be a whole new can of worms and it sort of harkens back to the tired old joke I made above. You said you wanted all the benefits of marriage. Now you’ve got them. Enjoy!

]]>http://hotair.com/archives/2015/10/06/federally-employed-same-sex-couples-lose-health-insurance-for-kids-unless-they-marry/feed/463879610Huckabee on the “law of the land”: The Dred Scott decision is still the law of the land, you knowhttp://hotair.com/archives/2015/09/10/huckabee-on-the-law-of-the-land-the-dred-scott-decision-is-still-the-law-of-the-land-you-know/
http://hotair.com/archives/2015/09/10/huckabee-on-the-law-of-the-land-the-dred-scott-decision-is-still-the-law-of-the-land-you-know/#commentsThu, 10 Sep 2015 22:41:27 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=3876662Via BuzzFeed, here’s an unusually stark example of the recurring question whenever Huckabee starts riffing on constitutional law. Is he lying deliberately to deceive his base or does he really not know better? It’s hard to believe a college grad who governed a state for 10 years could sincerely believe that Dred Scott, which held that blacks aren’t U.S. citizens, is still technically the law of the land in the United States. As you may remember from sixth-grade civics, that decision was nullified by the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments. It’s the single most dramatic example in American history of the Article V process being used to overturn a terrible Supreme Court ruling; if anything, you’d expect Huckabee to cite it as a model for people to rectify the Obergefell decision by supermajority will. (There’s a good reason Huck doesn’t do that, though.) It falls to Michael Medved to remind him that no, Dred Scott isn’t the law of the land and hasn’t been for 150 years now. So again, you tell me — did Huckabee think he could slip a falsehood like that past Medved, a lawyer by training, or did he genuinely not get the memo about the Reconstruction amendments? Both possibilities seem implausible.

Also implausible: Huck’s still arguing, many months after seizing on this argument, that Supreme Court rulings aren’t binding law until a legislature codifies them by passing a statute. Imagine a legal system where that was true, in which the civil liberties of individuals guaranteed by the Constitution as interpreted by the Court didn’t actually bind the government until a legislative majority signed off on them. Anyone see a problem with making minority rights dependent upon majority will? That’s another case where it’s hard to believe Huckabee’s arguing in good faith — this is, after all, good politics in Iowa even if it’s not good law — but now I don’t know after his Dred Scott point. Maybe it’s only certain especially bad Supreme Court decisions that he thinks should be submitted to the legislature for codification before they’re binding. In that case, which ones? Who gets to decide?

]]>http://hotair.com/archives/2015/09/10/huckabee-on-the-law-of-the-land-the-dred-scott-decision-is-still-the-law-of-the-land-you-know/feed/923876662YouGov poll: 56% support jailing Kim Davis, Republicans evenly split at 42 percenthttp://hotair.com/archives/2015/09/09/yougov-poll-56-support-jailing-kim-davis-republicans-evenly-split-at-42-percent/
http://hotair.com/archives/2015/09/09/yougov-poll-56-support-jailing-kim-davis-republicans-evenly-split-at-42-percent/#commentsThu, 10 Sep 2015 00:01:35 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=3876518I’ve seen two polls on this and both of them were bad news for Davis. Yesterday Rasmussen asked people if an elected official should be able to a ignore a federal court ruling that he or she disagrees with for religious reasons and got a 26/66 split. I can’t see the crosstabs there but it sounds like they offered that as a binary choice, with no middle-ground option of accommodating Davis’s objection by taking her name off the marriage licenses. Then again, if you follow Huckabee-an logic on this matter, Davis doesn’t need to be accommodated because the Supreme Court’s ruling in Obergefell is illegitimate and non-binding until the Kentucky legislature passes a law ratifying it, so the false choices work both ways in this debate. What pollsters are after here is finding out, in a strict either/or situation, whether a sincere religious objection by a public official to the new marriage regime should warrant punishment for noncompliance and, if so, how stiff that punishment should be. Should it involve jail time if the official defies a court order?

Yup, according to YouGov. On the threshold question of whether Davis should issue marriage licenses to gay couples even if it violates her beliefs, the public splits 54/32 with a heavy Democratic majority of 70/17 driving the topline result. Interestingly, though, Republicans tilt only mildly in Davis’s favor, with 46 percent saying she shouldn’t need to comply and 40 percent saying she should. Whether that 46 percent has an accommodation in mind, a la using Kentucky’s RFRA law to remove Davis’s name from the marriage licenses, or whether they want her to have some broader right to refuse is unclear. But when you ask people what Davis should do now that she’s vowed not to issue any marriage licenses so long as gay marriage is legal, fully 60 percent of Republicans think she should resign. Just six percent say she should remain in office and refuse to issue licenses, although 26 percent are okay with her staying in office and refusing to issue licenses to gay couples specifically. (Majorities in every demographic tested think Davis should resign rather than block licenses from being issued.)

Should she get jail time, though, for defying the court’s order to issue licenses? She sure should:

Even GOPers split evenly on that question. Overall 56 percent of those surveyed support jail time for violating the order versus 31 percent who don’t. When you refine the question to ask whether Davis should remain in jail until she agrees to comply with the order, though, the numbers change:

You can see the left-wing drift towards treating dissent on gay marriage as a thoughtcrime there. Licenses are now being issued to gay couples by Davis’s deputies; one of her deputies told NBC today that he’d continue to issue licenses even if she attempts to stop him. There’s no reason to keep her locked up to force compliance with the order since the order’s being complied with. But Democrats apparently would keep her in the clink until she’s renounced her error and accepted the truth, the light, and the way of the new marriage regime. YouGov should have asked a follow-up imagining her in jail for a year or two to see how many Democrats would be onboard with that.

One fascinating footnote in the crosstabs: Can you guess the demographic that consistently sides with Davis more than any other? It’s not Republicans. Here are the results by race when you ask the basic question of whether she should be required to issue licenses despite her religious objections.

Hmmmm. Same demographics on the question of whether Davis deserves jail for refusing to comply with the court’s order:

Hmmmm. Blacks are also much less likely to support jail time for refusing to follow court orders as a general rule, with just 39 percent in favor versus 65 percent of whites and 62 percent of Latinos, and less likely to say public officials should be required to perform work that violates their religious beliefs, with 36 percent supporting the idea versus 56 percent of whites and 46 percent of Latinos. The growing conflict between religious liberty and gay rights might in time create space for Republicans to grow their take of the black vote. Won’t happen overnight, but here’s proof that the Democratic coalition isn’t as lockstep on gay marriage as it likes to portray itself as being. They’d better be careful about taking socially conservative black opinion for granted, especially once it’s someone beside the first black president trying to sell them on the new orthodoxy.

On that same note, one more important data point: A clear majority of 53 percent, including 53 percent of blacks and 58 percent of Latinos, believes that the right of religious liberty is under threat. Among Democrats generally … just 33 percent say so, compared to 81 percent of Republicans. Keep your eye on that Democratic/minority divide going forward.

]]>http://hotair.com/archives/2015/09/09/yougov-poll-56-support-jailing-kim-davis-republicans-evenly-split-at-42-percent/feed/1303876518Quotes of the dayhttp://hotair.com/archives/2015/09/08/quotes-of-the-day-2193/
http://hotair.com/archives/2015/09/08/quotes-of-the-day-2193/#commentsWed, 09 Sep 2015 02:41:36 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=3876410A Kentucky clerk who defied orders to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples was released from jail Tuesday, but her lawyer says she will continue to resist until officials find a way to accommodate her religious opposition to gay unions…

“She told the court Thursday that she can’t allow licenses to go out under her name and her authority that authorize a marriage that collides with her conscience and religious conviction, and Kim is not changed on that position,” [her attorney Mat] Staver said.

***

Ms. Davis walked out of the detention center about 2:35 p.m., flanked by Mr. Huckabee, Mr. Staver and her husband, Joe, and apparently dressed in the same clothes she wore during a court appearance last Thursday. Reporters asked repeatedly if she would abide by Judge Bunning’s order, and not interfere with the processing of licenses by her office, but Ms. Davis remained silent…

The rally Tuesday had been scheduled before it was known whether Ms. Davis would be released. Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, also a Republican presidential contender, made an appearance, but it was Mr. Huckabee, a former Baptist pastor, who grabbed the political spotlight.

Mr. Cruz stood off to the side, keeping an unusually low profile during the event.

***

Is the priority ensuring that Rowan County’s gay couples can get the marriage licenses they are entitled to, without hassle? Or is it breaking a Kentucky woman asking for an accommodation?

If the goal is the former—to ensure the issuing of licenses—there are any number of solutions. Because though Ms. Davis makes clear that she believes same-sex marriage a violation God’s law, she’s not asking the state of Kentucky to share this view or even to deny couples their licenses. What she objects to is that the marriage licenses come with her name “affixed to the certificate.” She asks the state to find a way around this…

In an amicus brief, Kentucky Senate President Robert Stivers had the audacity to ask the District Court to “temper its response” to Davis and not judge her too harshly until the state laws and mindset had a chance to catch up to the Supreme Court’s mandate. This request would be laughable if it weren’t so reminiscent of the southern states’ arguments in Brown v. Board of Education that led to a mandate of school desegregation with “all deliberate speed.”

Time revealed that the vague mandate enabled states to take their sweet time enforcing the laws. In fact de facto segregation in our nation’s schools persists to this day because the court allowed states to legally lollygag. This case is no different.

We maybe one nation under God, but we are a democracy under the Constitution, as interpreted by the Supreme Court.

A federal judge has sent a Kentucky county clerk to jail for refusing to issue wedding licenses to gay couples despite a U.S. Supreme Court ruling in late June upholding the legality of same-sex marriage. The clerk insists that gay marriage violates her Christian beliefs.

As Davis’ mugshot flew across the Internet, it became clear that the gay rights movement must confront the idea that Christianity is under siege, said Kenneth Upton, senior counsel for Lambda Legal, a law firm specializing in LGBT issues.

The American Civil Liberties Union, representing couples she turned away, asked that she be fined rather than imprisoned, in part to avoid “a false persecution story,” said Dan Canon, one of the attorneys. But Bunning ordered her to jail anyway, reasoning that she would be unmoved by monetary penalties.

***

The proper manner to change the law, in this instance, is to work for the election of a president who will appoint Supreme Court justices with a different view and for the election of senators who will confirm such justices. Or to propose and pass a constitutional amendment. Davis may be impatient with this system, but it is the one we have. Personally assuming the role in Rowan County, Ky., of a Supreme Court majority is not an option. The available alternatives are to implement the law (as public servants across red America have overwhelmingly done) or to resign in protest (as some have done as well)…

Whatever your view of Justice Anthony M. Kennedy’s ruling on marriage, granting a wedding license is not in the same category as participating in a legal system that supported chattel slavery. It is, rather, participation in a legal system supporting liberal notions of individual rights. Davis believes that one of those rights is misapplied and misused. That is not the moral or legal equivalent of turning over Dred Scott to the slave catchers.

The Davis case is important, but mainly as a warning. Over the next few years, some religious institutions will be subject to legal challenges that are encouraged by Obergefell. This will not amount to religious persecution, but it will raise serious questions about the nature of religious pluralism. Some religious people will properly contend for their rights and interests.

But it is worth remembering: Legal arguments are not won by elevating bad cases.

***

This case raises several questions, beginning with this one: If Ms. Davis was a judge supervising a divorce proceeding, does she believe a court entering a divorce decree would also conflict with her duties? Or is gay marriage rather than, say, heterosexual divorce, the only issue she’s willing to go to the mat for when it comes to fidelity to “God’s moral law”? (Ms. Davis might want to re-read Matthew 19:9, where Jesus says, “And I say to you: whoever divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, and marries another, commits adultery.”)…

One can easily see the problem with the Davis-Huckabee line of reasoning. Assume that during a Huckabee administration liberals decided Bible verses about welcoming the stranger and alien in your midst were the basis to defend “sanctuary cities” and, therefore, refused to abide by federal immigration laws. When told they needed to comply or face legal consequences, those breaking the law claimed religious liberties protection – and declared that penalizing them for their lawlessness qualified as the “criminalization of Christianity.” Mr. Huckabee would rightly view that argument as absurd. One wouldn’t be criminalizing Christianity; one would be criminalizing those who don’t follow the law.

As for Huckabee’s invocation of Abraham Lincoln and Dred Scott as a justification for what Davis did, Governor Huckabee is simply wrong. Lincoln didn’t call for people to ignore or “disregard” the decision. Quite the opposite, in fact. Lincoln called on the Supreme Court to overturn it and the public to express its differences with it…

I believe, too, that the Christian view of human sexuality isn’t capricious or arbitrary; it is based on the creation order and human nature. Yet some evangelical Christians have proved rather adept at helping the cause of those who want to portray their faith as graceless, a blunt instrument in the culture war instead of a field hospital, quicker to judge others than attending to those who are struggling, wounded and broken.

***

The double standard on display is palpable. I don’t recall Keegen or any of the other self-righteous, newfound devotees of the rule of law calling for the resignation of Kentucky’s attorney general when he refused to defend his state’s marriage law — or any of the other state attorneys general who did the same, from California’s Jerry Brown to Pennsylvania’s Kathleen Kane, and several others, including perhaps most notoriously Oregon’s Ellen Rosenblum, who was caught actively colluding with plaintiffs to ensure judicial invalidation of the Oregon marriage law she disliked.

“But Davis was refusing to comply with a decision of the Supreme Court,” it will be argued. So, too, did all those illustrious attorneys general. At the time, all of them refused to do their duty and defend their state’s man-woman marriage laws, even though the binding precedent of the Supreme Court at that time, a 1972 case called Baker v. Nelson, was that such laws were constitutionally valid…

The Religious Freedom Restoration Acts, both the federal law and Kentucky’s version of it, required that Ms. Davis’s religious objection be accommodated as a matter of law. The federal court’s refusal to respect those laws is where the real lawlessness lies in this case. And of course, that lawlessness is quite apart from the not insignificant question of whether the Supreme Court’s Obergefell decision is itself lawless…

The federal courts in the 1950s and 1960s were newly asserting that a despised out-group had basic rights. That’s exactly what our Supreme Court is doing today, regarding gay men and lesbians…

The key to nonviolent civil disobedience is the willingness to step forward honestly and accept all the consequences, legal and otherwise, for one’s stand.

Kim Davis and her supporters should do so. And one of the consequences is that future generations will view her as exactly the same kind of person [George] Wallace was.

***

When politicians support Davis in defying the U.S. Supreme Court, they are making it clear why they should never be elected to any office, let alone the Presidency of the United States where they would take the oath to “support and defend the Constitution” since they are emphatically telling America that they wouldn’t support and defend it. They have announced that if you sincerely disagree with the Constitution, feel free to ignore it. And not just ignore it, make sure to use your position so that others are barred from following it.

I’m a proponent of peaceful civil disobedience in support of the Constitution. When the government isn’t doing what the Constitution promises—civil rights for all people, backing military veterans, helping the disenfranchised—then people should gather peacefully and let their voices be heard. Martin Luther King, Jr., Susan B. Anthony, Harvey Milk and many more who fought to bring the country in line with the spirit of inclusiveness expressed in our Constitution are such heroes because they battled to extend rights, not curtail them. However, Davis and her followers are not supporting the constitutional principles of the country, they are actually arguing against the most important ideals that are the foundation of the country: to not establish a state religion by letting government actions be determined by one religion…

Though she tries to fashion herself as a modern-day civil rights leader (her attorney has compared her to Dr. King), she’s no Rosa Parks. Instead, she’s the bus driver maintaining the status quo of injustice while forcing all the passengers to go where she takes them, not where they want to go. This country offers many options to those who are not satisfied with our laws. She could petition her legislators, she could become an activist, she could organize protests. She could even quit her job rather than compromise her spiritual principles. Quitting would have been more in keeping with martyrdom because by definition it requires sacrifice with no hope for personal reward. But there’s no celebrity in that.

First, there is a crucial distinction between a government official and a Christian wedding vendor who doesn’t want to participate in a wedding ceremony that violates her faith. One is backed by the state’s monopoly on force and can actually prevent people from obtaining licenses to which they are otherwise entitled. The other is part of a competitive marketplace, where in an overwhelming majority of cases, both the couple seeking a wedding vendor and the vendor seeking to act according to her faith can both get what they want.

Second, the country’s traditional understanding of religious liberty is being contested. A not insignificant number of opinion leaders now think of religious liberty as the freedom to have certain beliefs and act upon them in a place of worship, not necessarily to act upon them in the public square. For many, sexual identity is now the highest and most personal form of conscience, not faith.

As I’ve argued before, defending religious liberty in this environment is going to require a level of discernment and an ability to engage with people who might not have much experience with faith or find it very important. Among other things, this means being able to highlight the nuances that differentiate following one’s faith in the public square from discrimination, and making clear that religious liberty isn’t just a backdoor way of fighting lost political battles over same-sex marriage.

Davis doesn’t pass either of those tests.

***

But this time of relative peace may be at an end. Ever since Justice Kennedy began to establish a new federal religion, most concisely articulated in his infamous “sweet-mystery-of-life” passage in Planned Parenthood v. Casey (“At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life”), America’s Christians have seen their space in the public square shrink, with dissent re-labeled as discrimination and orthodox religious faith slandered as bigotry. Yet it’s critical for the social-justice warriors to understand that victory over the faithful in political and even cultural clashes will not cause them to yield. The alternative to accommodation isn’t coercion but rather conflict.

Last year — while writing in support of Religious Freedom Restoration Acts — I noted: : “Religious liberty exists as a core civilizational value not just because pluralist societies profit from it, but because the human heart demands it. If history teaches anything, it teaches that the religious impulse — the sense of eternity set in the hearts of men (to paraphrase Solomon) — is nothing if not powerful.” Or to put things more bluntly, Justice Kennedy can purport to change the Constitution, but he can’t transform Christian conviction. Unless his social-justice church grows more tolerant, the Kim Davis case is a harbinger of more conflict to come. We Protestants are simply returning to our roots.

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]]>http://hotair.com/archives/2015/09/08/quotes-of-the-day-2193/feed/4133876410Breaking: Federal judge orders Kim Davis released from jail; Update: She’ll halt new licenses, says lawyerhttp://hotair.com/archives/2015/09/08/breaking-federal-judge-orders-kim-davis-released-from-jail/
http://hotair.com/archives/2015/09/08/breaking-federal-judge-orders-kim-davis-released-from-jail/#commentsTue, 08 Sep 2015 17:25:06 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=3876359It might be a short reprieve: She’s released only on the condition that she not interfere with her deputy clerks when they issue marriage licenses.

The timing may seem odd given that Ted Cruz and Mike Huckabee are both in town and were planning to visit her in jail. Now that she’s free, they can all hold a big rally together and dump on the judge in front of a banc of microphones for “criminalizing Christianity,” as Huckabee likes to frame it. Judge Bunning may have felt he simply had no grounds to hold her any longer, though: The point of the contempt charge was to force her to comply with the law, but if all of the couples who were seeking licenses have now received them, then compliance has been achieved via her deputies. No need to keep up the pressure on Davis in that case — unless she forbids them from complying with the next applicants. Which, in all likelihood, she will.

As I write this, the media is outside the jail waiting for her to emerge and speak. No word on when Cruz and Huckabee make their appearance, but stay tuned for updates.

Update: Some of the less outspoken social cons in the GOP field aren’t thrilled with the grandstanding here from Huckabee and Cruz.

“Frankly, I don’t think you should grandstand on this stuff,” New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie said on “Fox and Friends” Tuesday morning, referring to 2016 candidates planning to visit Davis.

“Look, everybody is entitled to their opinions, and I love Mike Huckabee and what he stands for. But I just think there’s bigger fish to fry here in terms of people understanding what faith in God really means,” Ohio Gov. John Kasich told reporters in Maine on Tuesday. “I don’t agree with Court’s decision but I had said I was going to accept the court’s decision.”

Christie’s solution to the standoff is to try to have Davis reassigned to another government job with less potential for a crisis of conscience. Who wants to tell him that she’s an elected official and can’t simply be transferred to another department?

CNN correspondent Martin Savidge, who was at the jail, explained following the order that her attorney, Harry Mihet, said that the judge had ordered the release because her office had satisfied the court by issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples while she was behind bars.

“The problem here is that the attorney says she has not changed her mind, that Kim Davis is adamant that as long as her name appears on those marriage licenses, she objects and she will attempt to stop those licenses from being distributed,” Savidge reported. “Which means if she goes back on the job as is expected, she will bring the process to a halt. That’s what her attorneys believe.”

“They have said they expect her to go by her conscience which means we may go through this all again,” the CNN correspondent noted.

]]>http://hotair.com/archives/2015/09/08/breaking-federal-judge-orders-kim-davis-released-from-jail/feed/12613876359Oregon judge now under investigation for not performing same sex weddingshttp://hotair.com/archives/2015/09/05/oregon-judge-now-under-investigation-for-not-performing-same-sex-weddings/
http://hotair.com/archives/2015/09/05/oregon-judge-now-under-investigation-for-not-performing-same-sex-weddings/#commentsSat, 05 Sep 2015 15:31:12 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=3876147You will be made to care.

The currently incarcerated Kentucky clerk who won’t issue same sex wedding licenses has some company in the news this weekend. A judge in Oregon (who we’ve discussed here before) is drawing more than just media attention for not performing same sex – or any – wedding ceremonies. He’s now under investigation. (KGW News)

A Marion County judge has refused to perform same-sex marriages and has asked his clerks to refer couples seeking same-sex marriages to other county judges.

Judge Vance Day, a circuit court judge and former chairman of the Oregon Republican Party, is now facing an ethics investigation over that decision, according to the judge’s spokesman.

Spokesman Patrick Korten said Day instructed his staff to tell couples that the judge will not perform same-sex marriages. The staffers were instructed to refer same-sex couples to other Marion County judges willing to issue them a marriage license.

When this topic has come up in the past, one of the chief differences we noted between the Kim Davis situation and this one is that Judge Day and the rest of the judges in the state are not required to perform any wedding ceremonies. They are legally entitled to do so, but it’s an optional service they can perform above and beyond their normal duties on the bench. But this “ethics investigation” probably never could have taken place had he not made a point of telling his staff to forward the gay marriage requests to other judges. What’s left out of the local coverage above, though, is the timeline. The judge is no longer officiating any weddings at all, but an AP report seems to indicate that his decision was rolled out in stages. (Yahoo News)

When a federal court ruling in May 2014 made same-sex marriage legal in Oregon, Day instructed his staff to refer same-sex couples looking to marry to other judges, spokesman Patrick Korten said Friday.

Last fall, he decided to stop performing weddings altogether, aside from one in March that had long been scheduled, Korten said.

“He made a decision nearly a year ago to stop doing weddings altogether, and the principal factor that he weighed was the pressure that one would face to perform a same-sex wedding, which he had a conflict with his religious beliefs,” Korten said.

On one level, handling the matter this way has tossed Judge Day into the conscientious objector bucket… but only to a certain degree. There was apparently a period of time last year when Day was willing to perform traditional marriage ceremonies, but was turning away same sex couples. That sounds like a problem legally, but I’m not entirely sure that it is. Unlike the clerk who is charged with issuing licenses, the judge wasn’t cutting off anyone’s access to services. The state is full of judges, justices of the peace and any number of other folks who can do the job. Over in Clackamas County, for example, they helpfully provide a list of of all the folks who will marry you for a small fee, though they have some restrictions as well. (What’s up with Judge Zyranoff only performing weddings on Tuesdays? That’s got to be discriminating against somebody.)

The point here is that Vance Day could have avoided all of this and remained true to his beliefs by simply announcing last March that he would no longer be officiating at weddings. By choosing to make a public statement the way he did he has presented himself as a target of opportunity for the Social Justice Warriors and as such must be made to pay. I suppose an ethics investigation is the best they could muster up on short notice.

In closing, I would just note that this is yet another example of why the government shouldn’t be in the wedding business in the first place. Where does the government derive the power to pick and choose who can or can’t perform a wedding? What harm to society is threatened if an “unauthorized” person is chosen by two consenting adults to officiate their nuptials? And for that matter, where do they get off charging you $35 for a permission slip to have the service performed? All of this could have been avoided by striking the word “marriage” almost entirely from the tax code and the rest of our laws. (With exceptions for establishing minimum ages and settling competency for consent questions at the state level, of course.)

]]>http://hotair.com/archives/2015/09/05/oregon-judge-now-under-investigation-for-not-performing-same-sex-weddings/feed/2783876147Quotes of the dayhttp://hotair.com/archives/2015/09/04/quotes-of-the-day-2189/
http://hotair.com/archives/2015/09/04/quotes-of-the-day-2189/#commentsSat, 05 Sep 2015 00:41:09 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=3876131James Yates and William Smith Jr. paid $35.50 and filled out paperwork early Friday to become the first couple to get a marriage license in Rowan County since the U.S. Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage June 26. More couples soon followed.

With Rowan County Clerk Kim Davis in jail on civil contempt charges for defying a judge’s order to resume issuing licenses, deputy clerk Brian Mason ended the office’s two-month license ban by politely serving Yates and Smith on Friday, even congratulating them and shaking their hands afterward…

Marriage equality protesters shouted “Love won!” outside the Rowan County courthouse as Yates and Smith emerged. Across the sidewalk, a crowd of people who support Kim Davis stood mutely, save for one man screaming quotes from the Bible about Sodom and Gomorrah…

Staver said there are “easy ways to resolve this.” Officials could change state law and state documents so that marriage licenses in Rowan County won’t be issued under Davis’ legal authority, Staver said. The method may be as simple as an executive order from Gov. Steve Beshear, he said.

Catholic doctors who don’t want to perform abortions should have a right to refuse. And hospitals that want to fire them for refusing should have that right. You cannot demand a religious accommodation that is essentially refusing to do a core part of your job. Comparing Kim Davis to the many people who have been persecuted for their Christian beliefs is absurd. The choice for early Christian martyrs was to reject their faith or die. The choice was not: reject their faith or lose a good job as head priest at the Temple of Jupiter…

The judge made absolutely the right choice, much as I rue the necessity. Rule of law is one of the most important things between us and barbarianism. No, it is never perfect, but it is better than the alternative. It has to be preserved no matter which side is the target. Conservatives who applauded the Hobby Lobby decision and now applaud Kim Davis should take a long, hard think about how they’d feel if President Obama took a bold stand for freedom of conscience by slapping Hobby Lobby with fines in open defiance of the Supreme Court. If you think that only the other side has to obey laws they don’t like, then you are not in favor of the rule of law. You are in favor of law as a crude tool for the raw exercise of power — and when you are in a minority, as the opponents of gay marriage are, then you should carefully consider where this is likely to end up.

Unfortunately, the sheer volume of the culture war makes it hard to ask those questions. It’s much easier to ask “my team or yours”? And where that ends up is absurd results like a county clerk going to jail, instead of quietly going to work somewhere more suited to her religious principles.

***

It also must be added that no one who engages in true civil disobedience can presume to avoid punishment. This is how civil disobedience works. If there are thousands of Kim Davises ready to go to clog America’s jails for their beliefs, they might change the world, as other civil disobeyers have. But the trip to jail is part of that package.

Moreover, civil disobedience is properly the tool of the citizenry, not of those entrusted by it to execute the law faithfully. There exist exceedingly rare circumstances in which public officials can and should resist rightful authority that is exercised wrongly. But to condone official lawbreaking as a routine matter, whenever any individual bureaucrat’s conscience dictates, entails the acceptance of consequences that no good citizen can accept…

Huckabee’s claim that the practice of Christianity is being criminalized is a major theme of his candidacy, but he has always been careful to couch this contention in figurative terms. “I think it’s fair to say that Christian convictions are under attack as never before,” Huckabee declared in April. We are moving rapidly toward the criminalization of Christianity.” With the arrest of Davis, Huckabee’s contention that Christianity is being criminalized has taken on a more literal dimension.

This is base, ignoble exploitation. It is beneath a candidate running for the highest office in the land. It fosters the delusions of those not acquainted with the precepts that serve as the foundation for the rule of law in this country. It exacerbates a sense of victimhood, some of it real but much of it imagined, by a substantial minority of voters in this country who are justifiably anxious and frustrated by the heavy-handed fashion in which Barack Obama’s administration has governed.

Davis’s actions are reminiscent of Alabama Governor George Wallace’s infamous “Stand in the Schoolhouse Door.” In 1963, Wallace, who had declared “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever,” literally stood in a doorway at the University of Alabama to block two black students from entering the school, despite federal laws. Of course, this was nothing more than a political show for the cameras and segregationists. After jabbering on about states’ rights — as shallow an argument as it had been a century earlier during the Civil War — Wallace eventually stepped away, a small man pushed aside by the resolve of a nation struggling to be just…

Davis is just the latest in a long, infernal line of fanatics to contort their so-called faith into an excuse for hatred and division. Religion has been misused to justify the Crusades, slavery, apartheid, the Holocaust and — more recently — terrorism and extremism around the world. If faith is a comfort to some, for people like Davis it’s a cudgel to scold and threaten anyone with whom they disagree.

***

Hey @realDonaldTrump you can't make America great again by throwing the Christians in jail. (1/3)

The legitimacy of Davis’s protest is inseparable from the illegitimacy of the court opinion that made it necessary. And it is this very illegitimacy that means she should neither resign nor comply. Instead, she has chosen the proper response: resist.

Resignation in response to the Court’s ruling would have represented an unacceptable surrender. Indeed, from the perspective of the ideologues, it would have provided them with a complete victory — with the twin benefit of changing the law and cleansing public service of the devout. Resignations hand over the lever of power to the truly lawless, to those who will engineer social change by any means necessary…

Yet while lawless leftists live in the White House and run for president, Davis goes to jail. Davis’s draconian sentence is instructive. A judiciary secure in its reasoning and constitutional authority would see no need to deprive a peaceful woman of her liberty — especially when her resistance doesn’t deprive a single American of his constitutional rights, real or judicially fabricated. Other legal mechanisms exist to hold her accountable, including fines, impeachment, and — of course — the next election. But Davis goes to jail — shortcutting Kentucky’s own enforcement mechanisms — partly to save gay couples a few minutes’ driving time but mainly to defend the dignity of a court system that long ago forfeited any integrity.

***

According to CNN, when the news broke that Judge David Bunning had ordered Davis jailed, the crowd outside the courthouse incongruously burst out into a chant of “Love won! Love won!” I understand why the visceral response of gay-marriage supporters would be to cheer the jailing of Kim Davis. But in what Orwellian world does the desire to punish her represent a victory for love?

The jailing of Kim Davis is unnecessary. The governor of Kentucky, Steve Beshear, could have easily used the state Religious Freedom Restoration Act to authorize conscience exemptions for marriage clerks, essentially putting the burden of issuing the license on the office, not the individual. Five of six deputy marriage clerks have told the court they are willing to offer same-sex marriage licenses. Davis is unwilling to delegate authority to the clerks to sign the licenses with her name and seal, but that is a technical detail the governor or the legislature could easily overcome.

Free Kim Davis now. Our reaction to her jailing will tell us something important about the future of this country.

If she remains locked up at taxpayer expense, the only reason will be that Democrats want to use gay marriage as a club with which to beat traditional believers — and that Republicans are too gutless to act to stop them.

***

As far as I can tell, there are only three unassailable Constitutional rights left in United States: The right not to be “discriminated” against. The right to have an abortion. The right to have a gay marriage. In the eyes of a liberals, nothing—not the freedom of association or religion or anything else mentioned in the First or Second Amendment—will ever supersede these consecrated rights. The rest? Well, it’s malleable, depending on the situation…

There are many ways to show disdain for law. In America, we have a city council in Denver that advocates shutting down businesses like Chick-fil-A because the CEO once took a public position against gay marriage. That kind of abuse of power and contempt for the Constitution doesn’t get national play, because it’s the right kind of contempt. In this country, illegal immigrants can march in the streets to protest their station without any genuine fear of being rounded up and expelled. They are celebrated. The president ignores the legislative process and gives millions amnesty. We have cities that ignore federal drug laws because they find them oppressive. As Sean Davis points out, when California passed Prop 8, which banned gay marriage, a number of officials refused to enforce the law. But not one elected official has been hauled off to jail for any of these stands.

Yet, a Christian struggling to come to terms with the implications of a decision that changes over two hundred years of law that SCOTUS only reached a couple months ago—and our progressive president only embraced a couple of years ago— is now hauled off to prison. In the end, the state is creating martyrs. Christians will have no choice but to take more obstinate positions in the culture war—battles that could easily have avoided if a judge exhibited more compassion and came to an accommodation. There are around 125 other marriage clerks in Kentucky who could issue licenses to gay couples. And they should.

***

The rule of law is a virtue defined by the consistency of its exercise. When lawyers can pore over the system and conclude some officials can get away with disregarding the laws of our titanic central government, even though their negligence is a clear betrayal of their duties to their constituents – some of whom were raped and murdered as a result of that negligence – and the President can just make up the law as he goes along, while arms of the federal bureaucracy abuse their power to manipulate our very political system without consequence, but this one obscure functionary in Kentucky goes immediately into the slammer for her act of defiance, we can only conclude the rule of law is in horrible shape and we have a crisis on our hands…

We all know what the real difference between these various cases of official lawlessness is: power. The ugly political genius of Barack Obama was realizing that most of the restraints on executive power boiled down to polite, gentlemanly agreements. He calculated that the only real consequences for pushing the envelope were media disapproval (not an issue in his case, no matter what he does), the occasional court defeat (and he’s had quite a few), punishment by angry voters at the next election (a possible consequence that can be managed by skilled politicians with hundreds of billions of dollars to spend on intimidation and vote-buying) or the dead letter of impeachment.

Obama’s view of the presidency, made very explicit after his 2014 midterm election drubbing, is dictatorship not limited but sanctified by elections: no matter how many laws he twists or ignores, he can’t really be a dictator, because he rules at the sufferance of voters who could have “fired” him in 2012. They didn’t, so his nearly unlimited coercive power was ratified for four more years. He is audibly and visibly frustrated by every suggestion that he presides over a branch of government equal to the legislature and judiciary…

By all means, let’s have a vigorous national discussion about the Rule of Law, the misbehavior of our elected officials, and the importance of duty as a restraint upon the ambitions of those with power. It can begin with Kim Davis, but it must not end with her.

***

When Kim Davis, the Rowan County, KY, clerk was hauled off to jail for refusing to give marriage licenses, a White House spokesman said no official is above the law. Hillary Clinton cheered on Twitter. The left went wild. “Where is your god now?” one person tweeted…

Hillary Clinton using a private email server is no big deal to the left. Every changing story is met with acceptance. The Democrats’ immigration plans have included trying to pull a fast one on a judge in Texas and the left applauded. The IRS can leak confidential donor lists of conservative groups and harass the same groups. Political opponents get awfully convenient “random” audits. Again and again, the left gets to ignore the laws it wishes to ignore while the right must comply…

When all these things happen, we have moved beyond a nation of laws to a nation of men. When we have a nation of men, power is everything, policy is fleeting, and laws are meaningless. People with enough money can get preferential treatment. The more powerful a person is, the more he can escape punishment. Eventually, some men can decide to grab power by any means necessary and, without laws that can withstand the sway of men, get a pass at unconstitutional means used to grab power. The constitution becomes a worthless relic.

At that point, the citizens will clash beyond the ballot box. We see that beginning with random killings of police and random killings by police. It will only get worse. No one should want it and no one, myself included, does want it. But how much longer until we have another civil war?

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]]>http://hotair.com/archives/2015/09/04/quotes-of-the-day-2189/feed/6393876131Quotes of the dayhttp://hotair.com/archives/2015/09/03/quotes-of-the-day-2188/
http://hotair.com/archives/2015/09/03/quotes-of-the-day-2188/#commentsFri, 04 Sep 2015 02:41:07 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=3875982Five of six deputies in the office of a Kentucky county clerk taken into custody Thursday for her refusal to issue marriage licenses after the Supreme Court allowed gays to wed say they will process the paperwork starting Friday.

But Bunning said couples will have to decide whether to take that risk on their own. He indicated that he would lift the contempt charge against the defiant county clerk if deputies began issuing marriage licenses but said he was reluctant to release Kim Davis too quickly because of the possibility that she would stop the process and again try to go through the courts in a sort of ping-pong match.

Allowing Kim Davis, who previously has said she is an Apostolic Christian, to defy a court order could create a ripple effect among other county clerks, Bunning said. Two other clerks in the state also had stopped issuing marriage licenses but have not had lawsuits filed against them.

***

Bill Sharp, staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union of Kentucky, said his clients plan to seek marriage licenses in Rowan County on Friday.

“We think today’s ruling reflected, correctly, that Ms. Davis has been in contempt of court,” Sharp told reporters after court adjourned. “Regrettably, she chose to remain in custody rather than accept the suggestion that we proposed that she simply agree not to interfere with her employees’ willingness to issue marriage licenses to our clients and others who are legally entitled to receive them.

“This case and today’s ruling represents just as all the other rulings in the case have thus far, the fact that religious liberty is not a sword with which government, through its employees, may impose particular religious views on others, nor may it use religious liberty as a justification to withhold essential government services from the public.”…

Former Arkansas Governor and 2016 GOP presidential candidate Mike Huckabee today visited by phone with Rowan County Clerk Kim Davis, a Democrat, who is under fire from the left for refusing to issue same-sex marriage licenses in Kentucky. After their call, Gov. Huckabee issued the following statement:…

“The Supreme Court cannot and did not make a law. They only made a ruling on a law. Congress makes the laws. Because Congress has made no law allowing for same sex marriage, Kim does not have the Constitutional authority to issue a marriage license to homosexual couples.

“Kim is a person of great conviction. When people of conviction fight for what’s right they often pay a price, but if they don’t and we surrender, we will pay a far greater price for bowing to the false God of judicial supremacy. Government is not God. No man – and certainly no unelected lawyer – has the right to redefine the laws of nature or of nature’s God. Five unelected lawyers have abused their power by ruling in favor of a national right to same-sex marriage with no legal precedent and with nothing in our Constitution to back it up. They have violated American’s most fundamental right guaranteed by our Constitution – religious liberty.

Some people will call this ruling a triumph for the rule of law, a matter of harsh but necessary justice. It is no such thing. As I wrote in a piece earlier this week, the rule of law requires both lawful enactment and lawful enforcement. Justice Kennedy’s opinion in Obergefell v. Hodges is nothing more and nothing less than the establishment of Justice Kennedy’s world view as a new state religion — a religion with teeth…

In my initial piece about Davis, I described the unfolding drama as a case of competing revolutions — with Kim Davis defying Justice Kennedy’s revolutionary act with a revolutionary act of her own. We knew from the beginning which revolutionary held more power, and we also know that the worst revolutionaries show no mercy to dissenters. There were many options short of imprisonment for Davis (how many leftist legislators are in jail for lawless “sanctuary city” policies that actually cost lives?), but the court was apparently in no mood for moderation. So off she goes to prison. Judge Bunning’s decision is a means of control It is a means of maintaining order. It is the selective application of law to advance a particular radical ideology. But spare me any talk of justice. There is no justice today in Judge Bunning’s court.

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie told reporters that “the smart thing to do would be to move her to another job,” while Florida Sen. Marco Rubio told the New York Times before Davis was jailed that “there should be a way to protect the religious freedom” of court clerks.

South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham and former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina were the only two candidates to say that she was in the wrong, although they too said they respected where she was coming from.

“The rule of law is the rule of law. That’s what we are. We are a rule of law nation, and I appreciate her conviction. I support traditional marriage, but she’s accepted a job where she has to apply the law to everyone. And that’s her choice,” Graham told conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt on Tuesday.

***

What we have here is a quixotic local bureaucrat from a sparsely-populated county in the Appalachian foothills who has been rebuked by every authority she has come up against and whose cause has been championed only by the most reflexive revanchists in social conservatism (although jailing her is expanding her base of sympathy). In other words, the media would have us believe, we have a Major Constitutional Crisis…

This is the media equivalent of tossing a grenade to shoo a fly. Davis’s mainstream support is thin and qualified. She has lost in the courts, and was always going to. The media pretense is that this is a test case, but the fact pattern is so incredibly weak for Davis that it’s more like a show trial meant to demonstrate what happens to marriage dissenters…

But the villains LGBT advocates identified have continued to shrink in number and stature as the movement’s legal and cultural gains are being consolidated. That a Podunk county clerk is the best monster-du-jour they can scrounge up should be proof enough that the baddies bench is running a little thin. But Davis’s relative insignificance is exactly why she must be so thoroughly eviscerated. No one must feel themselves to be safely beyond the reach of the new orthodoxy.

***

Davis’s arrest was met with cheers by same-sex marriage advocates who for some reason did not demand imprisonment of officials who lawlessly issued gay marriage licenses in clear contravention of state and federal laws. Take, for example, Democrat Gavin Newsom, who is currently the California lieutenant governor. Back in 2004, when gay marriage was banned under California state law, Newsom openly defied the law and used his power as the mayor of San Francisco to force taxpayer-funded government clerks to issue gay marriage licenses…

And don’t you dare look for evidence of high-minded progressives demanding prison sentences for the Washington, D.C. bureaucrats who openly defied federal court orders to issue concealed carry permits in the nation’s capital. Nope. Instead of enforcing the law as handed down in multiple Supreme Court cases, D.C. officials kept manufacturing new reasons to justify their refusal to comply with federal gun laws.

Don’t even get me started on federal laws regarding drug possession. You won’t find progressives calling for the prosecution of scores of Colorado officials in open defiance of federal drug bans, or calling for the heads of federal officials who refuse to enforce federal drug laws in Colorado. No, those federal laws are icky. Sure, they’re indisputably the law of the land. And sure, officials have a duty to equally apply and enforce standing law, but icky laws are different. Only non-icky laws need to be enforced.

Perhaps natural marriage advocates should abandon their religious liberty arguments and instead declare whole cities to be marriage sanctuaries. That strategy has worked splendidly for open borders advocates. Who cares what the federal law requires when it comes to illegal immigration?

***

If flagrant law-breaking is the way to fight overreach, count me out of the insurrectionary crew.

Until such time as the Constitution is amended, the Court’s attitude changes, or the republic falls to revolution, Obergefell will remain on an equal legal footing with the other precedents that make up our contemporary legal oeuvre. Weak as its reasoning is, there is no such thing as an “almost ruling.” In practice, a 5–4 decision has the same effect as a unanimous one; structurally, an iffy justification is as potent as the most solid of rationales. However much a state employee might disdain a particular judgment, it simply cannot do to have him translating that disapproval into professional action. If he wishes to privately protest a given ruling — or to refuse to abide by its consequences — that is his inalienable right. “Take what you want,” the old proverb holds, “but pay for it.” He cannot, however, credibly work for the government while doing so — or, at least, he cannot expect to be spared the consequences if he insists upon remaining in power. The rule of law is just that: a rule. There is no such thing as a selective revolution…

Which is to say that Davis and her sponsors are ultimately fighting the wrong fight. A quick look over her own words reveals that she is not in fact presenting a withering argument against Obergefell; that she is not in fact attacking the concept of judicial supremacy; and that she is not in fact attempting to find a means by which Christians can co-exist with the recent changes in the law. Rather, she is unabashedly setting herself outside the law, and justifying it on entirely self-interested grounds. I comprehend my colleague’s frustration here — this is indeed the direct product of an insidious judicial usurpation — but I cannot help but feel that he is endorsing the wrong course. For my money, Davis’s protest would be far more effective were she to resign gracefully, and, having made clear her reasons for doing so, take up a new role as a champion for limited reform.

***

The legal enshrinement of homosexual marriage is not slavery or its moral equivalent, nor is it Jim Crow, nor is it abortion, the definitive moral issue of our time. And a society that is to have the rule of law cannot abide very many revolutions in miniature, especially those conducted by the people we still describe, with almost-straight faces, as public servants. As much as one might admire Davis’s conviction, David L. Bunning of the District Court for the Eastern District of Kentucky is right to put her in jail.

But maintaining that rule of law is a broader imperative, and Davis’s transgressions are trivial next to the entrenched criminality of the government that Judge Bunning serves: The Internal Revenue Service under the Obama administration was converted into a crime syndicate; Hillary Rodham Clinton is a rolling crime wave; the Justice Department is an enabler and protector of felons in high places; our law-enforcement agencies have been made into instruments of political intimidation, as in the matter of the ATF’s persecution of Jay Dobyns. There are many honorable men in the federal government, but there are no honorable federal officials, because one cannot honorably serve a dishonorable government. We may call Judge Bunning “His Honor,” but that is purely vestigial.

“Under a government which imprisons any unjustly,” Thoreau reasoned, “the true place for a just man is also a prison.” That we breathe the same free air as Lois Lerner, Eric Holder, and Hillary Rodham Clinton is a testament against us, that we may have a finer understanding of the distinctions necessary to republican self-government but lack the conviction necessary to act on it.

]]>http://hotair.com/archives/2015/09/03/quotes-of-the-day-2188/feed/5483875982Ohio judges advised that they can’t refuse to perform same sex weddingshttp://hotair.com/archives/2015/08/11/ohio-judges-advised-that-they-cant-refuse-to-perform-same-sex-weddings/
http://hotair.com/archives/2015/08/11/ohio-judges-advised-that-they-cant-refuse-to-perform-same-sex-weddings/#commentsTue, 11 Aug 2015 16:01:46 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=3873082I think we all knew there would be more than a few of these cases reverberating around the country following the Supreme Court’s decision on gay marriage, and this time it’s popping up in Ohio. Some municipal judges are either refusing to perform the ceremonies for gay couples or stopping performing marriages entirely, citing religious freedom objections. This prompted an inquiry at the state supreme court and their advisory Board of Professional Conduct has come back with an answer. Now if only somebody can figure out exactly what they meant.

And, while some municipal, probate and county court judges do not perform any weddings, their refusal cannot be based on “personal, moral or religious objections” to same-sex marriage, according to an advisory opinion.

The Board of Professional Conduct issued the opinion after it received requests for guidance following the U.S. Supreme Court’s 5-4 ruling overturning Ohio’s constitutional ban on same-sex marriage and legalizing it nationally on June 26.

This story has the potential to turn into a huge mess because of the multiple layers of complexity involved. First there is the question of whether or not municipal, probate or county judges can pick and choose which weddings they want to perform to begin with. If they are openly opting to pass on participating in a gay wedding while regularly conducting traditional ceremonies, that’s a battle they’re probably going to lose. It’s not all that cut and dried because, yet again, marriage is such a unique beast in the legal codes. Unlike a drivers license or a building permit, the government isn’t the only place you can go to have a ceremony performed (as opposed to the issuing of the actual marriage license which is government only) and judges certainly aren’t the only ones who do it. Couples can seek out a religious institution, a Justice of the Peace or any number of other officials. But the fact that it’s a service being offered by a public servant would probably doom any protest even when it’s based on religious liberty.

But what if the judge refuses to perform any ceremonies? As the advisory board notes, there are already judges who simply don’t agree to do weddings because their schedules don’t allow for it. That’s where the advisory board’s opinion goes from hazy to downright obscure. They seem to feel that busy judges don’t have to perform ceremonies, but the reason for not doing it has to be regulated.

“Judges are further advised that personal, moral, or religious beliefs should not be a factor … and to be aware of the impact that a decision to decline to perform all civil marriages may have on the public’s perception of the judiciary.”

Wait… they need to be aware of what it might do to the public’s perception of them? So this is just about politics and not the law at all? The board then goes one step further after all of this blathering and essentially says to pay no mind to them because they really aren’t equipped to weigh in on the legal merits in the first place.

The board said it was not empowered to determine whether state law makes it mandatory — or optional — for municipal, probate and county court judges to perform civil marriages.

So there’s one of the fundamental questions to be decided and it appears to be one which has never come up before. Just because a judge has the power to marry people, is it part of their job and an obligation for them? Or is it, as it’s long been treated, more of a side option which they may be honored to perform while their real job is to be sitting on the bench and deciding cases? It seems to me that judges who simply state that they are too busy to handle weddings on top of their judicial duties couldn’t be touched. But that doesn’t change the situation for those who choose to make the religious liberty argument and say that they will do some, but not others.

As I said at the top, this one is probably going to be a mess.

]]>http://hotair.com/archives/2015/08/11/ohio-judges-advised-that-they-cant-refuse-to-perform-same-sex-weddings/feed/903873082CDC on AIDS prevention: Talk about it and have sexhttp://hotair.com/archives/2015/07/18/cdc-on-aids-prevention-talk-about-it-and-have-sex/
http://hotair.com/archives/2015/07/18/cdc-on-aids-prevention-talk-about-it-and-have-sex/#commentsSat, 18 Jul 2015 20:01:44 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=3870318Over the last 30 years, HIV/AIDS has killed hundreds of thousands of people in America. Despite tremendous advances in medicine that allow victims of HIV/AIDS to live long, healthy lives, it is still a devastating disease that was diagnosed in nearly 14,000 people who died in 2012, according to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). And most of those men were what the CDC calls “men who have sex with men,” or MSM (a specific CDC label).

In fact, MSM “accounted for 78% of new HIV infections among males and 63% of all new infections” in 2010, despite making up, at most, four percent of the total U.S. population.

With these results, one might expect the CDC to issue a simple bit of advice to the gay male community: “Don’t engage in anal sex. It’s bad for you.”

Nope, not our politically correct friends at the CDC. Instead, as part of its “Act Against AIDS” campaign, the CDC put out a video a month ago that highlights people who are focused on stopping HIV/AIDS. One guy says he is “stopping HIV by blogging and speaking up about it,” a woman is “taking my HIV meds every day,” and an older man is “being open about living with HIV.”

Another person says he’s doing his part “by raising awareness through my poetry and arts.”

Last week, a similar ad on Pandora noted that for people with HIV/AIDS, their medicine stops working “every time you [have] risky sex.”

That ad depicted gay men in same-sex relationships, and told people with HIV/AIDS to “be strong.” (By talking about HIV/AIDS while using medication as you blog about art and engage in the riskiest sexual act possible?)

A new report from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) shows approximately 62 percent of gay men who know they have HIV/AIDS continue to engage in sexual relations without using a prophylactic, a behavior that can spread AIDS.

The report, which was released on the Friday after Thanksgiving, analyzed data gathered in 2011.

According to the report, the percentage of men with HIV/AIDS having sex with other men without a condom had increased from 55 percent in 2005, to 57 percent in 2008, to 62 percent today.

The CDC’s advice? Get tested, use condoms, be honest with sexual partners, and don’t sleep around:

To fight this, the CDC recommended MSM reduce the risk of HIV by “choosing less risky behaviors, using condoms consistently and correctly if they have vaginal or anal sex, reducing the number of sex partners, and if HIV-positive, letting potential sex partners know their status.”

It also recommends annual testing for men having sex with men, and “taking pre-exposure or post-exposure prophylaxis” as protection for some men at high risk. It also encourages more frequent testing. One-third of MSM were unaware they had HIV while engaging in risky sexual relations.

At the time, I asked a CDC spokesperson why abstinence — which has a 100 percent STI avoidance rate — was not listed as a preventative option. She told me that “we do know that not having sex is the most reliable way to avoid infection, and we include that as a prevention option in our media materials.” She highlighted an August 2013 graphic from the CDC that promotes abstinence as the first of three measures to prevent MSM from contracting HIV/AIDS.

This week, a different spokesperson addressed my questions about the CDC’s new ads. According to the spokesperson:

Act Against AIDS features multiple communication campaigns designed to serve specific populations at highest risk of acquiring or transmitting HIV, including sexually active gay and bisexual men and African American women. And, for those who are sexually active, our campaign messages aim to communicate how they can reduce the risk of infection.

However, when asked broadly how someone can protect themselves from infection, we consistently indicate that abstinence is the only 100 percent effective strategy for preventing infection. And, again, for those who are sexually active, we provide information on how to reduce risk.

Maybe the only method of HIV/AIDS protection that is 100% effective — sexual abstinence — could be advocated first and foremostevery time?

The CDC spokesperson wasn’t done:

The goal of Let’s Stop HIV Together – the campaign which contains the PSA you shared — is to raise awareness about HIV and to combat stigma. This ad is not intended to provide a full run-down of HIV and prevention, but rather to provide participants’ personal stories to raise awareness, fight stigma about HIV, encourage HIV prevention and testing, and champion the power of relationships in the personal and public fight to stop HIV.

I asked how the CDC defines stigma. The response:

Stigma and discrimination surrounding HIV and AIDS are still very real issues in the U. S. today — both fueled by myths, misinformation and misperception. Stigma is a major barrier to HIV testing, condom use and use of other effective, available prevention strategies. It also discourages those living with HIV from seeking the care and treatment they need to stay healthy and avoid transmitting HIV to others.

While it is certainly true that monogamously engaging in sexual acts reduces the chances of contracting HIV/AIDS and other STIs — whether those relationships are same-sex or opposite-sex — it is disappointing to see the CDC take the LGBT activist approach to sexually-transmitted HIV/AIDS. Anal sex, which is an intrinsic part of male-to-male sexual relationships, is simply dangerous. The CDC should consider promoting this stigma part of its public duty.

It is a well-established fact that MSM are most at risk to contract HIV/AIDS in America. Next on the list are women with multiple sexual partners and people who use needles for drugs — two other extremely unhealthy activity choices that should be avoided, not patched over with testing, “protection,” or medicine.

It is a credit to human ingenuity and compassion that people who have contracted HIV/AIDS are able to live long lives. But the CDC’s timid approach to HIV/AIDS prevention is problematic in the extreme.

The best way to drastically prevent HIV/AIDS is the same one that has existed since the dawn of man: Sexual relations between one man and one woman, for life.

Republican presidential candidate Marco Rubio said Wednesday he would oppose a constitutional amendment allowing states to ban same-sex marriage after the Supreme legalized it nationwide, even though he disagrees with the landmark 5-4 decision.

“I don’t support a constitutional amendment. I don’t believe the federal government should be in the marriage regulation business,” the Florida senator told reporters after a speech the Cedar Rapids Country Club in Iowa.

“We can continue to disagree with it. Perhaps a future court will change that decision, in much the same way as it’s changed other decisions in the past. But my opinion is unchanged, that marriage should continue to be defined as one man and one woman. The decision is what it is, and that’s what we’ll live under,” he said.

He said after the Obergefell decision came down that it should be respected as the law of the land, an orthodox position on a Supreme Court ruling but one which got him smacked around by social cons who accused him of caving too quickly to judicial tyranny. The solution to that political problem was obvious: He could endorse a constitutional amendment to overturn the decision, which would itself become the superseding law of the land. His friends in the donor class might grumble at an amendment that would seek to ban SSM outright but they’d surely be okay with one that proposed letting states define marriage within their own borders. It’s a federalist compromise on the issue, one that would allow state majorities to legalize gay marriage on their own without Republicans standing in their way. And it has zero chance of being ratified given the Democratic numbers in Congress so there’s no real political cost for someone who’s on record as backing traditional marriage to support it. Scott Walker and Ted Cruz have already endorsed the idea. All Rubio would be doing would be joining them.

Yet he refuses. I could understand if he justified his position by saying “an amendment will never pass” — that would at least be true, if not politically astute — but he’s not saying that. Instead he gives the bizarro reason that “the federal government should [not] be in the marriage regulation business,” which is … exactly what many conservatives have said in criticizing the Supreme Court’s decision. The Court’s part of the federal government and they’ve now imposed a coast-to-coast regulation on marriage. If you don’t believe the feds should be messing around with this subject, you should support returning the matter to the states, no? Rubio’s tactics are usually lucid but I don’t get why he’d go this route, unless he thinks that mere rhetorical support for a longshot amendment will be such a liability in the general election that he’d rather stay away from it in the primary. And if he feels that strongly, why continue to defend traditional marriage at all? Why not just “evolve” and be done with it?

In lieu of an exit question, on a semi-related note, enjoy the tweet of the day from Slate’s Will Saletan:

My son was marked down 5 percent on a high school health test because he chose this "incorrect" definition of family. pic.twitter.com/TnisIK51Mm

]]>http://hotair.com/archives/2015/07/08/marco-rubio-i-oppose-a-constitutional-amendment-that-would-let-states-ban-gay-marriage/feed/1893869103Jimmy Carter: Let’s face it, Jesus would support gay marriagehttp://hotair.com/archives/2015/07/07/jimmy-carter-lets-face-it-jesus-would-support-gay-marriage/
http://hotair.com/archives/2015/07/07/jimmy-carter-lets-face-it-jesus-would-support-gay-marriage/#commentsTue, 07 Jul 2015 19:21:33 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=3868890“I don’t have any verse and scripture” to back that up, he allows, but he’s got a good feeling about it. And why not? “Jesus” is really just a stand-in in this question for morality writ large, right? If you support SSM you think the practice is moral (I should hope), and if you’re a Christian who believes something is moral, almost by definition you need to believe Jesus thinks so too. There’s nothing doctrinal about this, by Carter’s own admission. It’s just “I feel strongly this is right, ergo God must as well.”

It occurs to me that I’ve never seen a poll on this question, asking religious gay-marriage supporters and opponents whether they think their position lines up with what God would want. That’d be interesting, especially among supporters. Opponents have the passage in Leviticus against homosexuality to stand on but supporters would be forced to either wing it Carter-style or concede that what God wants and what they want as a matter of public policy don’t always line up, a difficult admission for a person of faith. At least one religious person I know who backs SSM justifies it in render-unto-Caesar terms: A church should be free to refuse to perform gay weddings in accordance with its interpretation of God’s will but the state can’t refuse equal rights to all of its citizens on the same grounds, even if a majority agrees that God would disapprove. That solves the church-and-state problem of gay marriage potentially but it doesn’t really solve the WWJD problem. If you honestly believe that God opposes a certain practice, is it permissible to condone it as a matter of state policy (while refusing to participate in it yourself, say)?

]]>http://hotair.com/archives/2015/07/07/jimmy-carter-lets-face-it-jesus-would-support-gay-marriage/feed/2303868890Quotes of the dayhttp://hotair.com/archives/2015/07/03/quotes-of-the-day-2132/
http://hotair.com/archives/2015/07/03/quotes-of-the-day-2132/#commentsSat, 04 Jul 2015 00:31:19 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=3868545Everyone’s equal, everyone’s happy, love conquers all, and we are absolutely not heading to some dark, divisive place where the fabric of our society will be torn apart by people who, having invented “gay marriage” and imposed it on the entire country by a single Supreme Court justice, use it as a cudgel to wreak havoc on a host of other social and legal compacts which have … Oh. Hold on. Couple pieces coming in over the transom … Let’s check them out.

Here’s Fredrik DeBoer in Politico claiming that social justice demands we now legalize polygamy. Here are the mouthbreathers at Gawker doing the same, using Rod Dreher’s Law of Merited Impossibility. Here’s the ACLU’s Louise Melling declaring that “religious freedom” is nothing more than illegal discrimination. (Note how the Washington Post headline actually puts scare quotes around the term “religious freedom” in the headline.) Here’s Mark Oppenheimer arguing in Time that we ought to strip all religious groups-not just adoption agencies and schools, but actual churches, too-of their tax exempt status. Because gay marriage. (He’s willing to let hospitals stay tax exempt, because Obamacare will keep them in line. So there’s that.) And here’s the delightful Felix Salmon, who thinks that Oppenheimer perhaps goes too far, because we need only target religious organizations–and again, he means not just para-church groups, but actual churches–who aren’t onboard with “gay marriage.”…

So maybe this love, pride, and unity stuff is a little more zero-sum than gay activists have been letting on for the past few years. And maybe the gay-marriage project doesn’t really intend to stop with “gay marriage.” Though in fairness, I should point out that the Politico call for legalized polygamy didn’t come until nearly two hours after the Supreme Court decision. So clearly there’s no link between those two beautiful expressions of #loveislove. And anyone who suggests that there is, is a homophobic bigot. And by next week, anyone objecting to polygamy will be a poly-phobic bigot.

***

We get it. There is only one acceptable moral code, it’s dictated by cultural elites, and we will all be forced not only to accept it, but to live our lives according to it, and to public proclaim it — at least never to publicly proclaim any moral code contrary to it…

If a baker refused to sell a donut or a birthday cake to someone because that person was gay, that would be unjust discrimination, and illegal in a lot of places. But if a baker says, no I won’t cater your wedding, that’s refusing to participate materially in a ceremony you find morally objectionable.

This distinction is obvious and clear, but somehow it evades the Javerts of the Pink Police State…

It’s not surprising this distinction is lost on a set of people who see only black and white. Once the state acknowledges gay marriage, then everyone must acknowledge and celebrate gay marriage, their thinking goes. All things are other prohibited or mandatory. One only holds such views if one lacks the mental acuity to make distinctions.

Speaking to radio host Steve Deace, Huckabee pushed these points, reiterating promises to issue an executive order proclaiming his goal to “fully protect religious liberty at all levels” and to “instruct the defense secretary to immediately allow chaplains and to let chaplains know that they would be allowed to practice their faith as it is, not as it is desired by people who support same-sex marriage.”…

“The second thing I would do is I would issue a directive to the attorney general and I would, uh, insist that everyone’s religious liberty be vigorously defended,” he said. “That there be no, uh, allowance for people to have their businesses shut down and that those who would attempt to extort from them or anyone who committed a crime against a person because they didn’t accept homosexual marriage could be prosecuted for a hate crime.”

***

[A]s the dust settles on the Supreme Court decision legalizing gay marriage, it’s becoming clearer that the debate over the issue is going to shift to one of religious freedom. And on that issue, there’s much more of an opening for libertarians and social conservatives to get along.

At the core of libertarianism is the believe that people should be able to do whatever they want short of using force or coercion on somebody else. It makes sense why libertarians wouldn’t oppose gay marriage, for the reason that two men or women getting married doesn’t injure anybody else.

But with gay marriage legal, the cultural debate has been moving to issues such as: Should a religiously observant baker or photographer be forced to participate in gay weddings? Or, should a Catholic Church be forced to perform gay marriages?

I appreciate that Brooks cares enough about social conservatives to give us advice. But perhaps our call in the present moment is not mainly to persuade, but simply to bear witness, to testify to the truth in the face of hardened opposition. It wouldn’t be the first time God has called his servants to do so. Jeremiah was told he would speak God’s word to a stiff-necked people and they would not listen. God sent Ezekiel to a rebellious house, a people with “a hard forehead and a stubborn heart” (Ezekiel 3:8) and he equipped his prophet with a face as hard as the people’s…

The civil-rights movement was animated by a courageous faith and stood boldly against the hostility and evil of their own day. What’s more, when the early Christians were told to stop pointing out the sins of cultural leaders, their response was to pray for boldness and to keep speaking. “We must obey God rather than men.” And when the heat was turned up and the slanders came hot and heavy, God multiplied boldness and used opposition to his plan to accomplish his plan.

So we may be losing the “old” culture war. We may soon be treated as “social pariahs,” our schools losing accreditation, our churches losing tax-exempt status, and the sphere of religious liberty shrinking until we’re only allowed to think religious thoughts behind our eyes and between our ears (and then only one day per week). But we’ve been here before, and we’ll be here again. I’ve been reading my Bible, and from what I can tell, God loves cliffhangers, last-minute saves, and eucatastrophes. After all, when they had the Lord surrounded on one particular Friday, he had them right where he wanted them.

***

Critics of Evangelical patriotism in recent years denounce what they see as idolatry, nationalism, and an un-Christian my-country-right-or-wrong mentality that confuses God with nation. Usually these critiques of Evangelical patriotism have come from the left, but after the national same-sex-marriage decree, we may see an increasing number of conservative Christian voices urging Evangelicals to put some distance between themselves and America.

That would be a tragedy, for Evangelicals and America both. Christians of every nation in all times are called to serve and love their country, its rulers and people, to work for reform of national sins, and to boost national virtues. American Christians live in a nation of unparalleled power, whose culture and politics have been profoundly shaped by Christianity and whose global influence is, at worst, largely benevolent…

Conservative Christians especially should robustly celebrate July 4, showing their country and the world their confidence that God is lord of all the nations, including America the sinful, confused, blessed, and beautiful.

***

Christian conservatives feel that the culture is slipping away. The Supreme Court protects abortion on demand while it redefines the family so dramatically that even core First Amendment freedoms are on the “wrong side of history.” The church faces the most culturally and legally uncertain decade in living memory.

I remember speaking years ago with a friend — this was shortly after the Cold War, when America was the “hyperpower” and enjoying an extended economic boom — who said, “I wish I lived in meaningful times.” I knew what he meant. America was far from perfect, of course, but this was the “end of history,” and the good guys had just won. It was time to enjoy the fruits of victory. I was grateful for peace, but sometimes it felt like peace without significance.

It turns out that history didn’t end. America had more crossroads to face. I’m just thankful to be here, now, to do what little I can to nudge us down the right path. Happy Fourth. May you renew your commitment to the nation you love.

]]>http://hotair.com/archives/2015/07/03/quotes-of-the-day-2132/feed/5533868545Bad news from Mr. Sulu: Clarence Thomas is a “clown in blackface”http://hotair.com/archives/2015/07/02/bad-news-from-mr-sulu-clarence-thomas-is-a-clown-in-blackface/
http://hotair.com/archives/2015/07/02/bad-news-from-mr-sulu-clarence-thomas-is-a-clown-in-blackface/#commentsThu, 02 Jul 2015 16:41:14 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=3868406Via the Free Beacon, I think it was Dan McLaughlin of Red State who tweeted after last week’s SSM decision was released, “Now the contest begins to see who’ll be the angriest winner.” His point was that, for a movement that’s been unstoppable culturally over the past 10 years, there’s a curiously strong impulse towards nastiness in some lefties’ reaction to each new victory. With this remark from George Takei, I think it’s safe to say the contest is now over.

Takei’s overreacting to a point Thomas made in response to Kennedy’s idea that state recognition of gay marriage is at base about recognizing the equal dignity of gay citizens. Your dignity doesn’t depend on what the state thinks of you, countered Thomas. Each life has inherent dignity that the state can’t destroy even with severe depredations. It can tell you that you’re property but God says you’re a human being, and that’s that. His point was a variation on Eleanor Roosevelt’s famous line that “no one can make you feel inferior without your consent,” which is simplistic in an extreme case of oppression like slavery or internment but valuable as a defense of the essential humanity of exploited people. All Thomas was saying was that dignity is a matter of natural rights, not positivism. Gays have dignity whether the state acknowledges their marriages or not. But because he came out the wrong way on gay marriage and because he is, after all, Clarence Thomas, America’s most famous black conservative and therefore the country’s supreme race traitor in the eyes of the left, Takei not only willfully misunderstands his intentions but slides easily into a nasty racial crack about Thomas’s black authenticity. He’ll pay no price for it, needless to say. If anything, this is high-five material for jerkoffs who’ve already moved past last week’s landmark ruling and are busily gaming out how to bust tax exemptions for Catholic soup kitchens or whatever.

]]>http://hotair.com/archives/2015/07/02/bad-news-from-mr-sulu-clarence-thomas-is-a-clown-in-blackface/feed/5213868406Quotes of the dayhttp://hotair.com/archives/2015/07/01/quotes-of-the-day-2130/
http://hotair.com/archives/2015/07/01/quotes-of-the-day-2130/#commentsThu, 02 Jul 2015 02:01:21 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=3868347A federal appeals court on Wednesday afternoon directed the district courts in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas to issue final orders ending enforcement of the states’ respective bans on same-sex couples’ marriages.

In the Texas case, in which the trial court had struck down the ban, the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, in an opinion by Judge Jerry E. Smith, wrote that “the injunction appealed from is correct in light of Obergefell, the preliminary injunction is AFFIRMED.”…

In all three cases, the appeals court ordered the trial courts to act on the final resolution of the cases “by July 17, 2015, and earlier if reasonably possible.”

***

The damage to democracy is bad enough, but it is greatly compounded by the damage to American federalism. The federal government has no constitutional authority to regulate marriage, nor does it have a roving license to promote “dignity,” “autonomy,” or any of the other amorphous phrases contained in Justice Anthony Kennedy’s majority opinion. If the Constitution granted anything like that kind of authority to the central government, the document would never have been ratified. In Federalist No. 45, James Madison assured readers that, under the proposed Constitution, the states would remain sovereign over “all the objects which, in the ordinary course of affairs, concern the lives, liberties, and properties of the people” (emphasis added)…

Fundamental rights are blunt instruments because they leave lawmakers very little room to accommodate practices inconsistent with such rights. In the new regime, courts will likely hold that states are prohibited from placing any burden on the right to same-sex marriage unless it furthers a compelling state interest. Indeed, Justice Kennedy’s opinion makes numerous references to Loving v. Virginia, the case that struck down bans on interracial marriage. Never mind that the opposite-sex nature of marriage spans all eras and all cultures, whereas the anti-miscegenation laws struck down in Loving are a relic of the relatively brief Jim Crow era; for the Court, both are expressions of rank prejudice. If traditional marriage has the same moral status as Jim Crow, then how can one compromise with its adherents?

***

Currently, the tax-exempt status of such religious institutions (and schools, from pre-schools through graduate schools and seminaries), is protected under law. But not for long if Oppenheimer has his way.

He acknowledges the social good that many churches do, and the risk that charitable giving would drop if tax exemptions and deductions were removed. But his idea — drive charity away from churches and give it to the government instead — would further concentrate power in the hand of the state, a concentration the Constitution never envisions and which history tells us is profoundly dangerous. Given the massive inefficiencies and waste of federal “compassion” programs, not to mention the profound intergenerational dependence it has created, this idea is embarrassing on its face. Yet it’s one advanced with dead seriousness by Oppenheimer and his compeers in the anti-religious Left…

In a review of Hood County Clerk Katie Lang’s emails obtained through an information request, her comments to staff were strident: “We are not issuing [marriage licenses to gay couples] because I am instilling my religious liberty in this office.”…

After Attorney General Ken Paxton — the state’s civil lawyer, not a primary legal authority on county matters — advised clerks to defend religious freedom but expect lawsuits, Ellis County Clerk Cindy Polley wrote: “Does it seem to anyone else the AG is putting it back on us?”

“I am a follower of Christ and I believe strongly that the Bible is my final authority,” she wrote. ‘The Bible teaches that a marriage is to be between a man and a woman. Therefore, because of the recent ruling of the U.S. Supreme Court, I can no longer fulfill my duties as Circuit Clerk and issue marriage licenses to same sex couples.”…

“I told my supervisors a while back if it happened, I would tender my resignation,” she told me. “I had already decided in my heart that I could not issue marriage licenses to same sex couples. It’s my Christian belief. As a follower of Christ, I could not do it. The Bible teaches it is contrary to His plan.”

***

Even more than anti-discrimination employment laws, there is a significant philosophical divide between libertarians and many gay activists, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), and state-level civil rights commissions over the responses to religious business owners not wanting to provide their goods and services for gay weddings. We’re now seeing additional suggestions that religious colleges could be punished for not accommodating gay couples, and even an early suggestion that churches should not have non-profit status any longer.

The freedom to choose with whom to associate is a fundamental human and Constitutionally protected right. The ability to engage freely in commerce another one. Anybody with any doubts about the importance of free commerce to human liberty is encouraged to ask a nearby Venezuelan about the alternatives. As such, libertarians have consistently been supporting the rights of religious businesses and individuals to say “No thanks” to potential customers…

A wedding cake is not a right. A wedding photographer is not a right. Everybody has the right to engage in commerce. We have the right to buy and sell our services and goods, but it must be voluntary on both ends of the exchange. Nobody has the right to force the baker, the photographer, or anybody else to work for them in a free country. The exchange of money doesn’t make it acceptable…

That’s obviously not the case here. Nobody has presented a credible argument that gay couples have been completely unable to buy wedding cakes or rent photographers. There is no actual “harm”—just inconvenience. The vast majority of businesses across the country are more than happy to serve gay citizens. A handful of holdouts in non-essential services is not a good reason to bring to bear the full force of government to fix. It is callous and selfish to use the state to go after small businesses and try to extract fines from them or shut them down over a problem that barely even exists anymore. It is very clearly an effort to punish people for holding disfavored opinions or positions, something that used to happen with great frequency to gay people and their allies. Flipping the switch on who is punished by the state is not justice. Turning the machine off entirely is what we should all be calling for. On this issue libertarians will likely continue to stand with the religious holdouts for the foreseeable future, even if it’s on “the wrong side of history.” It’s on the right side of liberty.

The gay rights revolution will continue to fine-tune laws related to inheritance, taxes, job discrimination, family rights (that of surrogate parents vs. same-sex parents) and—now—divorce and custody issues. Getting the right to marry was the easy part—now comes the reality of marriage itself with all its hearthstones and heartaches! Rights for transgendered people (think Caitlyn Jenner) will need to be considered, and it’s entirely possible that the state could get out of the marriage business altogether and leave it entirely up to individuals.

And then there’s atheists, agnostics and secular humanists—who have been following the strategy of the LGBT community in “coming out” campaigns to show that we are just as moral, just as worthy and just as good citizens as believers.

The animal rights revolution has been underway for as long as the gay rights revolution, but it’s a different animal (if you will), given the cross-species leap we have to make to expand our moral consideration, which is not easy to do. But the trends are in the right direction in terms of our sympathies with preventing harm and suffering to more and more species. Chimps are being retired from medical research, cattle farms are becoming more humane, the killing of marine mammals such as whales and dolphins is nearly universally taboo, along with cock fighting, dog fighting, and bull fighting, and hunting and meat eating are both in decline.

***

The left will destroy the things you care about, because you care about them. It will destroy them because that gives them power over you. It will destroy them because these things stand in the way of its power. It will destroy them because a good deal of its militant activists need things to destroy and if they can’t attack you, they’ll turn on the left in a frenzy of ideologically incestuous purges.

The left’s social justice program is really a wave of these purges which force their own people to hurry up and conform to whatever the Party dictated this week. Examples are made out of laggards on social media to encourage the rest to stop thinking and start marching in line. As Orwell knew well, these shifts select for mindless ideological zombies while silencing critical thinkers…

The purpose of power is power. The left is not seeking to achieve a set of policy goals before kicking back and having a beer. The policy goals are means of destroying societies, nations and peoples before taking over. If you allow it a policy goal, it will ram that goal down your throat. It will implement it as abusively as it can possibly can before it moves on to the next battle.

]]>http://hotair.com/archives/2015/07/01/quotes-of-the-day-2130/feed/4873868347Mitch McConnell: This SCOTUS decision on gay marriage is the law of the land and there’s not much we can dohttp://hotair.com/archives/2015/07/01/mitch-mcconnell-this-scotus-decision-on-gay-marriage-is-the-law-of-the-land-and-theres-not-much-we-can-do/
http://hotair.com/archives/2015/07/01/mitch-mcconnell-this-scotus-decision-on-gay-marriage-is-the-law-of-the-land-and-theres-not-much-we-can-do/#commentsWed, 01 Jul 2015 20:01:48 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=3868298Via Newsmax, skip to 4:20 for the key part. He’s not saying anything here that, say, Marco Rubio hasn’t but the McConnell endorsement surely cinches this among grassroots righties as the official RINO position. (Sorry, Marco!) Meekly submitting to the will of the Court isn’t what warriors do. Which raises the question: What should the GOP, as a party, do to resist?

Should they encourage county clerks to refuse to issue marriage licenses to gays? That might work short-term, until other state officials can be found who’ll grant the licenses, but it’s likely to bring a lot of legal grief upon the holdout clerks.

Two things can happen if a Kentucky clerk won’t issue a marriage license to a same-sex couple: They can resign, or go to jail, said Sam Marcosson, a constitutional law professor at the Louis D. Brandeis School of Law at the University of Louisville…

Clerks and probate judges hold the keys to marriage in counties around the country, and in many rural areas, there are few alternatives for hundreds of miles. Couples turned away could seek a court order, and a clerk who still refuses to issue a license could be jailed for contempt, Marcosson said.

They also risk criminal official misconduct charges, said Warren County Attorney Ann Milliken, president of the Kentucky County Attorneys Association. The misdemeanor, punishable by up to a year in jail, is committed when a public servant “refrains from performing a duty imposed upon him by law or clearly inherent in the nature of his office.”

Declining to issue a license is a good way for an individual clerk to opt out of a system he or she believes is immoral but it’s not a sustainable strategy for resisting SCOTUS’s decision en masse. Most clerks won’t risk their jobs by quitting, even if they’re leery of SSM, and the ones who do will be replaced. A comprehensive solution would require a constitutional amendment of some sort, as Ted Cruz has been urging. McConnell’s asked about that below and he dismisses it out of hand: Realistically, he says, there’s no amendment that the public will support to punish the Supreme Court for this decision. Public backing of SSM is consistently above 50 percent in polls; if you believe yesterday’s CNN survey, 59 percent give thumbs up to SCOTUS’s ruling. Cruz himself was asked about that recently by Jorge Ramos and he laughed off the polling. Don’t go by what the polls say, he argued, go by what the states themselves have actually done. Traditional marriage laws have passed repeatedly by popular referendum. True enough, but to overturn SCOTUS now, you’d need not just three-quarters of the states but two-thirds of Congress at a moment when supporting SSM has become an absolute moral litmus test for Democratic pols among the lefty base. How is McConnell going to find 67 votes in the Senate to pass some sort of Federal Marriage Amendment? There were, in fact, four members of his own caucus who supported gay marriage as of last June. He might have trouble getting to 50 votes to overturn SCOTUS, let alone 67.

What about Cruz’s other idea, for an amendment that would make Supreme Court justices periodically answerable to the public in the form of retention elections? Megyn Kelly confronted him on the air about that last night. Why do you think that John Roberts or Anthony Kennedy would be jeopardized by a retention election, Kelly asked him, rather than Antonin Scalia or Clarence Thomas? A country that elected Barack Obama twice by landslide margins is a country capable of ousting one or more conservatives on the Court. Cruz has no answer for that, and he offers no reason to think that passing some earth-shaking Supreme Court overhaul like this would be any easier than simply impeaching Roberts or Kennedy for their poor decisions (an outcome which he concedes is impossible given Congress’s reluctance to impeach anyone). Even if all Senate Republicans backed the idea, which they wouldn’t, are there 13 Democrats who’d join with them, knowing that it’s very likely Hillary Clinton will be the next president and that one of the Court’s aging conservatives is apt to retire soon? Why would they risk the chance of a new, enduring liberal Court majority by exposing the current liberal justices to retention elections? Meanwhile, Republicans would balk at the thought that even young appointees like Alito and Roberts, who have decades ahead of them on the Court, could be forcibly retired by liberal voters in an election. Retention elections are a supremely risky (no pun intended) strategy for punishing the Court over ObamaCare and gay marriage and they’d be seen as such in Congress. That amendment’s going nowhere either, even though it makes for a nifty soundbite for Cruz on the presidential trail. So what now?

]]>http://hotair.com/archives/2015/07/01/mitch-mcconnell-this-scotus-decision-on-gay-marriage-is-the-law-of-the-land-and-theres-not-much-we-can-do/feed/1753868298Quotes of the dayhttp://hotair.com/archives/2015/06/30/quotes-of-the-day-2129/
http://hotair.com/archives/2015/06/30/quotes-of-the-day-2129/#commentsWed, 01 Jul 2015 02:01:42 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=3868216County clerks in Southern states that had struck a defiant tone on same-sex marriage began issuing marriage licenses to gay couples Monday, with state leaders pledging to protect the religious liberties of county workers who oppose such unions…

But many counties across the region said they were not ready to comply with the Supreme Court ruling that declared marriage a constitutional right for all Americans, with at least some waiting for firmer guidance from their state attorneys general. And some state leaders advised county officials that they may opt out of their duties if they have a religious objection to same-sex marriage…

“I’m aware of no general legal doctrine or precedent holding that county or other public officials are exempt from abiding by rights articulated by the Supreme Court in the event the religious beliefs of those public employees are in conflict with the federal right,” said Daniel Pinello, a professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York…

Polling generally suggests that same-sex marriage is not a top issue for most voters. A February CNN/ORC survey found that just 17 percent of Americans said the issue of gay marriage would be “extremely important” in choosing a candidate to support for president — the lowest of any of nine issues tested.

But digging deeper provides a different perspective. Beyond the importance voters place upon it directly, gay marriage may have symbolic power because of the messages it sends to voters about the parties…

In the Republican column, the coefficient for gay marriage is large and negative, meaning that supporting it substantially reduces the likelihood that someone will identify as Republican. In fact, based on the regressions, the only variable more predictive of Republican identification is whether a person believes health care coverage is the government’s responsibility. Gay marriage is more important than classic “wedge issues” like guns or abortion in predicting whether someone identifies as a Republican…

From income-tax breaks to estate planning benefits to Social Security and insurance benefits to the right to make medical decisions for one’s spouse, there are all kinds of carrots dangled in front of Americans as rewards for getting hitched. Instead of putting unmarried individuals on equal footing with married people, the government has chosen to appease the masses by blessing another category of monogamous couples with the privileges of marriage—those of the same sex.

Since we’ve discovered polyamory, we don’t care about new houses or new cars or vacations. What really makes us tick is the idea of falling in love, over and over and over again. Now, we have the best of both worlds: the security of a steady, stable partner, to have and to hold, and the sense of adventure and excitement at the thought of the unknown, the possibility of new romance around every corner, the butterflies in our stomachs we never thought we’d get the chance to feel again.

***

Some have also suggested that polygamous marriage should have a greater claim to legitimacy than same-sex marriage since it is far more rooted in history. But that argument misses a key factor in the cultural shift on same-sex marriage: gender equality as a central value of modern society. Historical polygamy is strongly linked to male dominance and female subjection—while monogamy arguably formed the basis of the transition from patriarchal authority to companionate partnership that eventually paved the way for same-sex unions.

Despite the dire warnings of gay marriage critics and the pleadings of polygamy supporters, the logic of same-sex marriage does not inevitably lead to multi-partner marriage. Slate columnist William Saletan has argued that the key number is not two but one: “You commit to one person, and that person commits wholly to you.” (The word “monogamy” is derived from the word root for “one,” not “two.”)

Logic aside, the prospective success of multi-partner marriage depends on whether the public mood will shift to support it, the way it has for same-sex marriage. Will such an evolution happen? It would likely a much tougher uphill battle, not least because “I want to make a full commitment to the person I love” is a far more sympathetic claim than “my needs are unfulfilled in a sexually exclusive relationship.” If social liberals in the academy and the media decide to champion non-monogamy as the next frontier of liberation and equality, they could make some headway in promoting acceptance of such lifestyle choices. But the likely result would be a new conflagration in the culture wars—particularly since, this time around, these choices do affect other people’s marriages.

***

I actually thought it was a virtue that I couldn’t get married, and I still do. Because the state and society wouldn’t accept gay couples, the gay community had to come up with their own ways of codifying their existence. Wedding announcements for same sex couples ran in gay papers, some gay couples adopted each other so that there would be some official recognition of their union, and enterprising couples looking for a big party founded the “commitment ceremony” (which sounded like it would be held for someone involuntarily entering an asylum). More important, not having a standard set of behaviors to pattern ourselves after, gay relationships became more varied. Each couple had to talk about what they expected of each other, who was able to have sex with whom, and just what the boundaries and expectations were for this union.

That’s what I loved about being gay. We didn’t need the state, the church, our parents, or Emily Post telling us how we should live our wedded lives; we were making it up as we went along and finding new configurations and arrangements that worked for each individual couple rather than a one-size-fits-all approach to marriage that is so stifling it has lead to the skyrocketing divorce rate.

Now that is all gone, or at least on its way out.

***

I’ve supported same-sex marriage ever since I first heard the idea. And when I became a political columnist in the early 2000s—despite being the “conservative” at a good-sized newspaper—I was the only one at the paper (as far as I can recall) who unequivocally backed gay marriage publicly. Though I wasn’t gullible enough to believe I’d be persuading many readers, I was gullible enough to believe that my allies in the cause were merely concerned with “equality.”

As we dig out from the avalanche of half-baked platitudes about “love being love” and watch alleged news organizations and the White House adorn themselves in cheerful rainbows, we can look forward to the self-righteous mobs that will be defaming anyone who is reluctant to embrace the state’s new definition of marriage. Love is love, except when a person loves their God and follows the principles of their faith, evidently…

How many backers of theoretical gay marriage will regret the reality of gay marriage? As a matter of policy, it doesn’t matter much anymore. And I have no moral qualms about same-sex marriage itself. I don’t believe it destabilizes the institution or ruins the lives of children. Then again, it doesn’t exist in a vacuum, either. If same-sex marriage isn’t just a pathway to happiness, freedom, and equality for gay citizens, but a way to pummel religious Americans into submission, it will be a disaster.

As Justice Samuel Alito suggested in his dissent, thousands of Americans who never dreamed that the issue would affect them will soon get highly personal lessons in how the legalization of same-sex marriage by judicial fiat threatens their schools, their institutions and even their livelihoods. This is not your father’s culture war.

A century ago, another Supreme Court justice famously wrote that the Constitution “is made for people of fundamentally differing views.” How far we have traveled since.

Those seeking to crush all dissent from the new judicial orthodoxy on marriage will not always win, not least because the right to the free exercise of religion—in bald contrast to Mr. Kennedy’s right to dignity—is in fact in the Constitution. Still, however individual cases may turn out, by foreclosing the option for democratic debate and compromise the Supreme Court has ensured a bitter national harvest.

***

[T]he civility of our society may now depend on the willingness of the winners to lay down their arms by not engaging in the use of government force against those that disagree with them. After so many years of enduring the brunt of vicious attacks by anti-gay activists, this may seem like a lot to ask. “An eye for an eye” may be the justification for advocating laws that penalize those with anti-gay views. Such an approach is wrong and shortsighted. The war to end discrimination against gay and lesbian citizens wasn’t won with laws, it was won with love.

This is a pivotal moment. The end of hundreds of years of brutality and discrimination against gay and lesbian people is within sight. A bright future is possible where people of differing sexual orientations can live as equals and friends. That future can be achieved most quickly if gay equality advocates resist the temptation to use laws and coercion against those who disagree with them. In other words, treat opponents exactly the opposite of how gay and lesbian citizens were treated for hundreds of years: by treating them as you, yourself, would like to be treated. By being loving and compassionate.

By setting an example of tolerance and civility. It is this weapon, the golden rule, that brought down government discrimination. And it can further advance a more civil and just society.

***

I am to the left of the people I have been describing on almost all of these social issues. But I hope they regard me as a friend and admirer. And from that vantage point, I would just ask them to consider a change in course…

Put aside a culture war that has alienated large parts of three generations from any consideration of religion or belief. Put aside an effort that has been a communications disaster, reducing a rich, complex and beautiful faith into a public obsession with sex. Put aside a culture war that, at least over the near term, you are destined to lose.
Consider a different culture war, one just as central to your faith and far more powerful in its persuasive witness…

I actually think the Supreme Court’s decision on Friday hurts the Republicans in 2016. I think a lot of people whose votes they need will throw up their hands and walk away. They see a lot of Republican politicians declaring it time to move on. They see 300 Republicans, a lot of them from George W. Bush’s administration, supporting the decision. These cultural conservatives think it is time to get out of Dodge while the getting is good.

The 300 Republicans who wanted this case to go away as a political issue, might find that the base they have relied on goes away with it. They will not expand their base with black and hispanic voters as small government, cultural liberals. They will lose more of their base as they move away from cultural conservatism altogether.

American society has lost its mind. It has come unmoored. Deviant is normal and celebrated. Right is ridiculed. Evil is good and good is evil. These things sort themselves out over time.

***

All of this is worrisome, and all of it should be resisted, but none of it represents an existential threat to the church. The only real threat is surrender — caving to the cultural, legal, and political forces demanding conformity. The church can and will survive persecution. It will not survive faithlessness. This is both a theological and historical truth…

Defiance, however, means more than merely ensuring that your church or your Christian school doesn’t change its policies. It means more than still donating to your church even if the day comes when you can’t deduct the contribution. It means a willingness to lose your job, your prosperity, and the respect of your peers. It means saying no every time you are compelled to applaud or participate in the sexual revolution. It means standing beside fellow Christians who face persecution or job loss — not just shaking your head and thinking, “There, but for the grace of God . . . ” It means having the courage to proclaim an opposing message — even during mandatory diversity training, even when you fear you might lose your job, and even when you’re terrified about making your mortgage payment. And through it all, it means being kind to your enemies — blessing those who persecute you…

Even in the U.S., Christians who’ve not yet faced these tests likely will, and soon. When they do, it is the church’s responsibility to ensure that they not do so alone. As the church stands, it must remember that our present troubles are meaningless compared to the deadly challenges facing the church in the Middle East. And, always, we must remember who controls our destiny…

]]>http://hotair.com/archives/2015/06/30/quotes-of-the-day-2129/feed/2573868216Quotes of the dayhttp://hotair.com/archives/2015/06/29/quotes-of-the-day-2128/
http://hotair.com/archives/2015/06/29/quotes-of-the-day-2128/#commentsTue, 30 Jun 2015 02:01:58 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=3868092The religious schools are concerned that if they continue to ban gay relationships, the Internal Revenue Service could take away their tax-exempt status as a violation of a “fundamental national public policy” under the reasoning of a 1983 Supreme Court decision that allowed the agency to revoke the tax-exempt status of schools that banned interracial relationships…

Rick Scarborough, the founder and president of Vision America, a conservative Christian organization based in Nacogdoches, Tex., said he had never seen pastors so angry and ready to resist a Supreme Court ruling. He said 50,000 pastors and church members had signed a petition to the Supreme Court justices warning that they would consider a law recognizing same-sex marriage an “unjust law.”

“If they change the playing field and make what we do out of bounds, we will disobey; we will disrespect this decision,” Mr. Scarborough said in an interview. “We’ll treat it like Dred Scott and other decisions courts have handed down over the years that counter natural law. God made a male and a female, and no amount of surgery is going to change that.”…

“If I were a conservative Christian (which I most certainly am not),” [Eugene Volokh] wrote on a law and religion email list, “I would be very reasonably fearful, not just as to tax exemptions but as to a wide range of other programs — fearful that within a generation or so, my religious beliefs would be treated the same way as racist religious beliefs are.”

***

“Finally, it must be emphasized that religions, and those who adhere to religious doctrines, may continue to advocate with utmost, sincere conviction that, by divine precepts, same-sex marriage should not be condoned. The First Amendment ensures that religious organizations and persons are given proper protection as they seek to teach the principles that are so fulfilling and so central to their lives and faiths, and to their own deep aspirations to continue the family structure they have long revered. The same is true of those who oppose same-sex marriage for other reasons.”

And that’s … it. That’s the entirety of [Anthony] Kennedy’s comment on the matter. You know how sometimes you hear something or see something and it sounds nice and then when you think about it, you start to realize that it was carefully worded to make it seem nicer than it is? Well, this doesn’t even require a re-read for your antenna to go up. I mean, it’s true that the First Amendment recognizes the right of the religious to teach. But it does ohhhhhh so much more than that! It actually guarantees freedom of religious expression, of which teaching the faith is but one small part. Or as the First Amendment puts it, Congress shall make no law prohibiting the free exercise of religion. To pat the religious on the head and say, “you can kind of still teach, for now” while discovering a new constitutional right in deep conflict with those teachings is disconcerting, to put it mildly…

Kennedy’s muddled opinion included a total of one paragraph on the most contentious religious freedom issue of our time. Even that paragraph showed, as Thomas put it, a mistaken understanding of the First Amendment. Perhaps when the media complete their marches in pride parades and finish their breathless coverage of a rainbow-spackled White House and are done changing their logos to rainbow flags, they can take a few minutes to glance at these dissents, each of which express grave concerns about religious freedom and the rule of law.

[T]he exemption-and-deduction regime has grown into a pointless, incoherent agglomeration of nonsensical loopholes, which can allow rich organizations to horde plentiful assets in the midst of poverty.

Defenders of tax exemptions and deductions argues that if we got rid of them charitable giving would drop. It surely would, although how much, we can’t say. But of course government revenue would go up, and that money could be used to, say, house the homeless and feed the hungry. We’d have fewer church soup kitchens — but countries that truly care about poverty don’t rely on churches to run soup kitchens.

Exemption advocates also point out that churches would be squeezed out of high-property-value areas. But if it’s important to the people of Fifth Avenue to have a synagogue like Emanu-El or an Episcopal church like St. Thomas in their midst, they should pay full freight for it. They can afford to, more than millions of poorer New Yorkers whose tax bills the synagogue and church exemptions are currently inflating.

***

It’s important to note that the tax exemption for churches and other religious organizations is not embedded in the Constitution. The First Amendment guarantees freedom of religion, but that’s free as in love, not free as in beer. Taxation is a purely secular affair, and by default it applies to everybody equally, whether they’re a religious institution or not. It would be unconstitutional to single out religious institutions to make them pay more tax than anybody else, but the government has every right to stop giving them special tax-free privileges. (One example: the Mormon church owns a theme park in Oahu which pays no federal taxes. That’s even after a Hawaii court found it to be “not for charitable purposes”, and therefore subject to local property taxes.)…

In the Bob Jones case, the US government made a very important statement. It’s not enough, they said, to support the right of interracial couples to date and get married; it’s also important to register official disapproval of any organizations which fail to support that right. To be given exemption from paying taxes is a special privilege bestowed by the state on deserving organizations. But there’s nothing deserving about an organization which bans interracial dating. So, the state is entirely within its powers to remove that privilege.

We have religious freedom in this country, and any religious organization is entirely free to espouse whatever crazy views it likes. But when those views are fanatical and hurtful, they come into conflict with the views of any honorable legislator who believes in freedom and equality. And at that point, it makes perfect sense for our elected representatives to register their disapproval by abolishing the tax exemption for organizations who cling to narrow-minded and anachronistic views.

***

Just as America has mostly avoided traditional conflicts between Protestants and Catholics, Christians and Jews, Sunni and Shia, atheists and believers — so too Americans’ commitment to tolerance, diversity, and dignity is perfectly capable of making room for the rights and dignity of those who disagree about the meaning of marriage.

But good-faith compromise — of the sort that is Americans’ unique political genius — is possible only if the government gives us the space to find it…

We will have this debate. The only question is whether we start a conversation or we let the fundamentalists pick a fight…

According to the Urban Institute, about two-thirds of reporting public charities in the United States had revenue of less than $500,000 a year in 2012. Because many smaller organizations do not face the same reporting requirements as larger ones, the percentage of charities and other nonprofits with revenues of less than half a million a year is probably even greater than that estimate. For these organizations, there isn’t that much money to go around. Moreover, the Urban Institute found that, in 2012, all nonprofits that had to report in depth their finances to the federal government had combined revenues of $2.16 trillion and expenses of $2.03 trillion. That’s a gap of only $130 billion (about 6 percent of the total revenue). For nearly every nonprofit, therefore, increasing tax levels would lead to a cutback in services, a reduction of assets, or, potentially, bankruptcy…

Oppenheimer shrugs off the fear that ending tax deductions for charities could lower private giving by saying that government could step into the breach: “We’d have fewer church soup kitchens — but countries that truly care about poverty don’t rely on churches to run soup kitchens.” He thus suggests that we ought to accept the replacement of private works of charity with state intervention because this replacement is the sign that we “truly care” about poverty. The idea that government intervention is the only true way of caring about poverty reveals, perhaps, a lack of moral imagination…

The errors of the present remind us of the wisdom of the past. As Edmund Burke recognized, the state is no substitute for the non-governmental institutions of civil society. Churches and other groups performed charitable works long before the invention of the welfare state, and these private actors still often provide more effective and humane services than do faceless government bureaucrats (as the recent VA scandals suggest). The efforts of the bureaucratic leviathan often fall far short of the hard day-to-day work of rabbis, artists, soup-kitchen volunteers, teachers, and nurses.

The nonprofit sector is far from perfect, and it would be a mistake to think that valuable enterprises can happen only in the nonprofit world. After all, some of the greatest American cultural achievements of the past century have occurred in the very profit-driven fields of film and television. However, the tax policies governing nonprofits have made it easier for the institutions of civil society — schools, churches, charities, and so forth — to flourish with astounding diversity.

***

No one should think that IRS implications will stop with colleges. Religious high schools, grade schools and any other religious institution will face the same outcome. And this includes churches…

Colleges and universities that receive federal funding will be coerced into immediate compliance. Accreditation agencies will ratchet up their bullying of Christian institutions, as has already been done against Gordon College in Massachusetts. Threats to accreditation are fatal. Colleges may not legally operate in several states without it.

Christian colleges and churches need to get prepared. We must decide which is more important to us — our tax exemption or our religious convictions. Keep in mind, it is not the idea that the college itself might have to pay taxes that is the threat. Schools like Patrick Henry College, which I started, never run much of a profit. But since PHC refuses all government aid, all of our donations for scholarships and buildings come from tax deductible gifts. Cutting off that stream of revenue is effectively the end of such colleges absent a team of donors who simply don’t care if gifts are deductible.

***

But how, one wonders, would we determine which views [of tax-exempt organizations] are beyond the pale? If our standard should “at least” be that institutional opposition to a “fundamental right which is held by all Americans” should deprive an organization of its tax-exempt status, we will need to do away with almost all politically minded nonprofits. That would be a radical step indeed. It is an indisputable fact that many nonprofit outfits are dead set against the infamous Citizens United decision, and hope to see it overturned. Other groups, such as the tax-exempt Violence Policy Center, are vehemently opposed to the rulings in D.C. v. Heller and McDonald v. Chicago, and would not only like to see them reversed, but aspires to help usher in a nationwide handgun ban afterwards — in other words, to overturn a right that has obtained in one form or another in America since the late 17th century, and which is explicitly enumerated within the nation’s founding charter.

It is not just single-issue outfits. Within the non-profit archipelago there sits a whole host of magazines, opinion generators, and religious charities — almost all of which take strong positions on what the Constitution means and how the Court should interpret it, and almost all of which could be accused of conspiring to “cling to narrow-minded and anachronistic views” and to “espouse whatever crazy” or “fanatical” or “hurtful” views they like. If, as Salmon argues, it is flatly wrong to “reward” churches for opposing basic constitutional rights or for saying things that our thoroughly modern arbiters of taste find retrograde, surely it is wrong to “reward” non-religious organizations for doing the same? Mother Jones, the product of a 501(c)(3), not only wants to overturn part of the First Amendment, but has published a “DIY Guide” to doing so. Should it be stripped of its status? On the other side of the aisle, the Heritage Foundation, also a non-profit, opposes the decision in Roe v. Wade, which, until such time as it is altered or rendered moot, protects abortion as a “fundamental right which is held by all Americans.” Should it be removed from the rolls because its governing board considers that Justice Blackmun erred in 1973?

***

No, the real intent of removing tax-exempt status is to cripple the institutions that continue their dissent from the sexual revolution. When tax exemptions are removed, donors will give far less than they are giving now. Churches will become liable to property taxes. That means that many churches will have to forfeit their property to the government because they won’t be able to afford the taxes they have to pay on it. Many of them wouldn’t be able to pay them now. If donations went down, they would be that much further from being able to pay them. As a result, churches that reside on valuable properties in urban locations would be immediately vulnerable. Eventually, so would everyone else…

So let’s put aside the propaganda and say clearly what Oppenheimer is calling for. A call for ending tax exemptions for religious institutions is a call to close them down—or at least to plunder them of their property. That is what is going on here. Think of the irreparable harm that would follow if and when these many small churches are effectively forced to close their doors—harm that will come not only to these ministers and parishioners themselves, but also to the poor and vulnerable: lost foster-care services, tutoring of teens, material and spiritual relief for the poor, and character development, often in the places it is needed most.

I am wondering if the average gay-marriage supporter flying the rainbow on his or her Facebook profile knew he or she was signing-up for this when agreeing to support gay marriage?…

]]>http://hotair.com/archives/2015/06/29/quotes-of-the-day-2128/feed/4453868092Lindsey Graham: Let’s drop the idea of a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage from the GOP party platformhttp://hotair.com/archives/2015/06/29/lindsey-graham-lets-drop-the-idea-of-a-constitutional-amendment-to-ban-gay-marriage-from-the-gop-party-platform/
http://hotair.com/archives/2015/06/29/lindsey-graham-lets-drop-the-idea-of-a-constitutional-amendment-to-ban-gay-marriage-from-the-gop-party-platform/#commentsMon, 29 Jun 2015 16:41:44 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=3868025Interesting cost/benefit question here: Would it hurt the GOP more than help them to do this? It’s not like Democrats would suddenly stop demagoging the issue if Republicans changed their platform. Regardless of what the RNC does, Hillary will remind young voters at every opportunity that her GOP opponent personally supports limiting marriage to one man and one woman. Meanwhile, some social cons will interpret a change to the official Republican platform as a formal surrender in the culture war over gay rights, a dangerous bit of alienation in the heat of a close election. My hunch is that the party has more to lose by pissing off its base in removing the “marriage amendment” language than it does to gain in attracting voters who, let’s face it, are unlikely to care much what the platform says either way. Graham’s entirely right that the amendment is pie in the sky, but that’s not the point. The point is signaling. What signal would be sent by removing it?

Another interesting question is whether there’s any substitute amendment that the GOP could propose that would make evangelicals and other social conservatives happy enough that they wouldn’t mind seeing the one-man-one-woman language go. It’s a fait accompli that the next Republican platform will call for shielding religious business owners from antidiscrimination laws (Graham himself mentions that here). Whether that proposal takes the form of a constitutional amendment or something else is just a detail. If that’s not aggressive enough, they could compromise by adding a modified Federal Marriage Amendment that merely seeks to return the issue to the states, as Scott Walker recommends, rather than to enshrine one-man-one-woman as the universal marriage law of the land. That would be less objectionable to pro-SSM swing voters while also pleasing red-staters who want their state ban back in effect. Or, if they want to really get proactive, they could up the ante by supporting Ted Cruz’s proposal over the weekend to make Supreme Court justices submit to “retention elections” periodically. That has only a marginally better chance of becoming law than the amendment Graham describes does, but it’s good populism. Even the left can find something to love in a plan that would give them a shot at booting Antonin Scalia off the Court, no?

Now I’m wondering which GOP candidates are with Graham on this. The social conservatives like Huckabee, Cruz, Santorum, Jindal, and Carson obviously aren’t. How about Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio? It’s not strictly inconsistent to say, as Jeb and Rubio (and John Kasich) have, that the Court’s SSM ruling must be respected while also supporting an amendment to overturn it. That’s a procedural question at bottom: We must follow the Court’s ruling while it’s binding but there’s no reason we shouldn’t try to overturn it. Graham’s giving up on overturning it partly because that’s not where his policy interests lie — he’s a pro-amnesty hawk, not a social issues warrior — and partly because, as a marginal candidate, he doesn’t need to worry about ticking off the Republican base. The electable candidates like Bush and Rubio do. Which way do they go on this?

]]>http://hotair.com/archives/2015/06/29/lindsey-graham-lets-drop-the-idea-of-a-constitutional-amendment-to-ban-gay-marriage-from-the-gop-party-platform/feed/1073868025Quotes of the dayhttp://hotair.com/archives/2015/06/28/quotes-of-the-day-2127/
http://hotair.com/archives/2015/06/28/quotes-of-the-day-2127/#commentsMon, 29 Jun 2015 00:01:49 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=3867948A few months after Kelo was released, the Senate Judiciary Committee held its hearings on the confirmation of John Roberts to be the next chief justice of the United States. Not surprisingly, Kelo was a topic of much concern among Senate Republicans. They wanted to know if Roberts shared their outrage about the Court’s judgment and if Roberts agreed that Kelo was a judicial travesty that should be overturned as soon as possible.

But Roberts was not so quick to concur with that negative assessment. In fact, Roberts argued that Kelo had a silver lining. The Court’s ruling, Roberts said, “leaves the ball in the court of the legislature, and I think it’s reflective of what is often the case and people sometimes lose sight of, that this body [Congress] and legislative bodies in the States are protectors of people’s rights as well.”

It was perhaps the single most revealing moment in Roberts’ entire confirmation proceedings. The future chief justice had just used Kelo, one of the worst decisions of the 21st century, to make a subtle yet undeniable argument in favor of judicial deference to legislative bodies. If you don’t like what your lawmakers have done, Roberts plainly suggested, take your complaint to the ballot box, not to the courthouse.

“Why does he want to preserve Obamacare?” asked conservative commentator Charles Krauthammer. “I’m not sure it’s because he believes in the policy. I think he’s afraid that if the court overturns something so broad, so deep, so important that was debated for a year and a half, it will damage the court. And he sees his role as a protector of the reputation of the court.”

The reason Roberts believes the court’s reputation is at stake may be the key to understanding what’s happened. Roberts doesn’t feel protective of the institution because of parochial vanity or romantic nostalgia. He’s protective of the court because it’s been under relentless attack from the left as long as he’s been there.

Epps wrote: “On the Roberts Court, for the first time, the party identity of the justices seems to be the single most important determinant of their votes. The five Republican justices sometimes divide in cases (such as the scope of the federal Treaty Power or the validity of ‘buffer zones’ around abortion clinics) that spawn purely ideological debate. But they are united and relentless in pushing for victory in cases that have a partisan valence.”

This week proved how prescient Epps’ observation was. The Court was meant to be debating the role of the federal government in the twin intimacies of our physical health and our expressions of love. Instead, though, its members talked over each other. They flung insults. They assumed the worst. “The stuff contained in today’s opinion,” Scalia sneered in his reaction to his colleague, “has to diminish this court’s reputation for clear thinking and sober analysis.” You could say the same thing, though, about the stuff contained in that day’s dissent.

***

Thursday’s decision demonstrates how easily, indeed inevitably, judicial deference becomes judicial dereliction, with anticonstitutional consequences. We are, says William R. Maurer of the Institute for Justice, becoming “a country in which all the branches of government work in tandem to achieve policy outcomes, instead of checking one another to protect individual rights. Besides violating the separation of powers, this approach raises serious issues about whether litigants before the courts are receiving the process that is due to them under the Constitution.”

Roberts says “we must respect the role of the Legislature” but “[A] fair reading of legislation demands a fair understanding of the legislative plan.” However, he goes beyond “understanding” the plan; he adopts a legislator’s role in order to rescue the legislature’s plan from the consequences of the legislature’s dubious decisions. By blurring, to the point of erasure, constitutional boundaries, he damages all institutions, not least his court.

***

If I were a cynic, I’d tell the Supreme Court to stand for election, since they have now taken to making law rather than interpreting it. Or, we could simply eliminate the Court altogether, and just make all decisions with an online opinion poll. That would be cheaper for taxpayers.

As for Chief Justice Roberts—he’s easily the best politician in Washington.

Constitutional torture is an art, and Chief Justice John Roberts has emerged as its Andy Warhol: an impresario who will put his name on anything.

It is uncomfortable to think about, but our Supreme Court functions in much the same way as Iran’s Guardian Council: It is a supralegislative body of purported scholars, distinguished by ceremonial black robes, that imaginatively applies ancient doctrines “conscious of the present needs and the issues of the day,” as the ayatollahs over there and over here both put it, deciding — discovering! — what is mandatory and what is forbidden as the shifting currents of politics dictate. The main difference is that the Iranians take their sharia rather more seriously than we take our constitutional law: John Roberts’s opinion in Burwell wasn’t just wrong — wrong can be forgiven — it was embarrassing, craven, and intellectually indefensible. Antonin Scalia was right to let him have it with both barrels, but he’d do better to resign from the Supreme Court — it is difficult to see how an honorable man could be associated with it.

***

Once it has become a given that a critical mass of the Supreme Court is no longer expected, much less obliged, to do law, then the Court is no longer a legal institution. It is a political institution.

That is where we are. We should thus drop the pretense that the Court is a tribunal worthy of the protections our system designed for a non-political entity — life-tenure, insulation from elections, and the veil of secrecy that shrouds judicial deliberations.

If the justices are going to do politics, they should be in electoral politics. If John Roberts is going to write laws on the days when he isn’t posing as powerless to write laws, if Anthony Kennedy truly believes the country craves his eccentric notion of liberty (one that condemns government restraints on marriage 24 hours after it tightens government’s noose around one-sixth of the U.S. economy), then their seats should not be in an insulated third branch of government. They should be in an accountable third chamber of Congress…

The Supreme Court is not unique in being captured by progressives. It is a lagging indicator, its crush of late-June edicts reflecting what’s become of the political class of which it is now very much a part. The president rules unilaterally and in contravention of the laws. Half of Congress applauds, the rest shrugs and says there is nothing to be done. The elements of the progressive agenda the political branches don’t feel safe implementing are delegated to anonymous bureaucrats in the administrative state. The courts are there to finish the job, to give any mopping up the aura of legal rigor.

***

The time has come, therefore, to recognize that the problem lies not with the lawless rulings of individual lawless justices, but with the lawlessness of the Court itself. The decisions that have deformed our constitutional order and have debased our culture are but symptoms of the disease of liberal judicial activism that has infected our judiciary. A remedy is needed that will restore health to the sick man in our constitutional system.

Rendering the justices directly accountable to the people would provide such a remedy. Twenty states have now adopted some form of judicial retention elections, and the experience of these states demonstrates that giving the people the regular, periodic power to pass judgment on the judgments of their judges strikes a proper balance between judicial independence and judicial accountability. It also restores respect for the rule of law to courts that have systematically imposed their personal moral values in the guise of constitutional rulings. The courts in these states have not been politicized by this check on their power, nor have judges been removed indiscriminately or wholesale. Americans are a patient, forgiving people. We do not pass judgment rashly…

Judicial retention elections have worked in states across America; they will work for America. In order to provide the people themselves with a constitutional remedy to the problem of judicial activism and the means for throwing off judicial tyrants, I am proposing an amendment to the United States Constitution that would subject the justices of the Supreme Court to periodic judicial-retention elections. Every justice, beginning with the second national election after his or her appointment, will answer to the American people and the states in a retention election every eight years. Those justices deemed unfit for retention by both a majority of the American people as a whole and by majorities of the electorates in at least half of the 50 states will be removed from office and disqualified from future service on the Court.

]]>http://hotair.com/archives/2015/06/28/quotes-of-the-day-2127/feed/5153867948Open thread: Sunday morning talking headshttp://hotair.com/archives/2015/06/28/open-thread-sunday-morning-talking-heads-184/
http://hotair.com/archives/2015/06/28/open-thread-sunday-morning-talking-heads-184/#commentsSun, 28 Jun 2015 12:01:30 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=3867879Believe it or not, for a brief moment this week it looked like the Sunday shows would be consumed by navel-gazing about the Confederate flag. Now that SCOTUS has blown that up, it’s gay marriage with a side of ObamaCare. If you’re looking for table-pounding about SSM, Mike Huckabee will be on “This Week” and Bobby Jindal will be on “Meet the Press” to announce their pretend plans to roll back the Supreme Court’s decision. How will Trump counter in the populism sweepstakes? We’ll find out on “State of the Union” when he sits down with Jake Tapper. As recently as two years ago he admitted to “evolving” on the issue but insisted he still supported one-man-one-woman marriage at the time. Presumably the evolution has now ceased in time for the Republican primaries. Expect him to focus on the Court’s ObamaCare decision this week instead, not only because it’s an easier target but because he can use it to knock Jeb Bush for promoting John Roberts as a Court appointee 10 years ago.

If you’re gay-marriage’d out, Baptist leader Russell Moore will be on “Face the Nation” to chat about his widely circulated op-ed this week calling for South Carolina to take down the rebel flag. The money quote: “The cross and the Confederate flag cannot co-exist without one setting the other on fire.” The full line-up is at the AP.

]]>http://hotair.com/archives/2015/06/28/open-thread-sunday-morning-talking-heads-184/feed/873867879Quotes of the dayhttp://hotair.com/archives/2015/06/27/quotes-of-the-day-2126/
http://hotair.com/archives/2015/06/27/quotes-of-the-day-2126/#commentsSun, 28 Jun 2015 00:31:05 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=3867887Hillary Clinton, at the end of what she described as “an emotional roller-coaster of a day,” called on Republicans running for president to stop opposing the expansion of gay rights and move on to other issues.

“Instead of trying to turn back the clock, they should be joining us in saying, ‘No, no to discrimination once and for all,’” the Democratic presidential frontrunner said at an evening gathering of the Democratic Party of Virginia held in the Washington suburb of Fairfax. “I’m asking them, ‘Please don’t make the rights, the hopes of any American into a political football for this 2016 campaign.’”…

“We can sum up the message from the court and the American people in just two words: Move on,” she said.

***

Many Republican strategists privately say they believe 2016 will be the last year their nominee can get away with not supporting gay marriage rights. The key question, they say, is whether by 2020 the damage to the party will already be done.

“It may be a fatal problem for them as the generation turns,” said Charles Francis, who served as chairman of the Republican Unity Coalition, an alliance of gay and straight Republicans that worked with the administration of President George W. Bush. But after Mr. Bush decided in 2004 to support a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage, Mr. Francis resigned.

“Republicans have had a few opportunities, a few exit ramps,” Mr. Francis said, “and they’ve steadfastly failed.”

***

In Alabama, two officials announced another method of resistance: If they couldn’t stop same-sex marriage, they would stop marriage itself. They said they would no longer issue marriage licenses to anyone, gay or straight, ever again.

“I will not be doing any more ceremonies,” said Fred Hamic (R), the elected probate judge in rural Geneva County. The other was Wes Allen (R), the probate judge in Pike County. Both said that state law doesn’t require their counties to issue marriage licenses at all. If people want to wed, they can go to another county.

“If you read your Bible, sir, then you know the logic. The Bible says a man laying with a man or a woman laying with a woman is an abomination to God,” Hamic said. “I am not mixing religion with government, but that’s my feelings on it.”

***

[E]ven many [gays] who raced to the altar say they feel loss amid the celebrations, a bittersweet sense that there was something valuable about the creativity and grit with which gay people responded to stigma and persecution.

For decades, they built sanctuaries of their own: neighborhoods and vacation retreats where they could escape after workdays in the closet; bookstores where young people could find their true selves and one another. Symbols like the rainbow flag expressed joy and collective defiance, a response to disapproving families, laws that could lead to arrests for having sex and the presumption that to be lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender was shameful.

“The thing I miss is the specialness of being gay,” said Lisa Kron, who wrote the book and lyrics for “Fun Home,” a Broadway musical with a showstopping number sung by a young girl captivated by her first glimpse of a butch woman. “Because the traditional paths were closed, there was a consciousness to our lives, a necessary invention to the way we were going to celebrate and mark family and mark connection. That felt magical and beautiful.”…

“There is something wonderful about being part of an oppressed community,” Mr. Marcus said.

***

The majority offers little more than hand-waving about the slippery slope where all this points. Religious institutions will still have protection under the First Amendment, they say, to “teach” their opposition to same-sex marriage, but the extent of that liberty is not defined. History suggests it could be rapidly curtailed — to prevent religious institutions from having codes prohibiting employees from engaging in homosexual relationships, for instance, or even, someday, forcing the institutions themselves to perform same-sex ceremonies. The majority opinion offers no standard for where freedom of conscience may protect individuals. And if marriage is a fundamental right and the court must update its meaning with the times, what stands between this opinion and legalized polygamy? (A decade or two?)

The problem with gay marriage is not gay marriage. People of the same sex getting married will not destroy America. But it will impact America in serious ways that have ramifications for people well outside the scope of these unions – and not just the baker, photographer, florist or gazebo owner who have been highlighted to this point as the victims of overly litigious bureaucrats seeking bigots to destroy. The consequences of this decision will most rapidly be felt by religious schools and non-profits, as those who once fought for civil liberties for all will turn on those whose liberties they find to be inconvenient. Already the ACLU has announced they will no longer defend federal religious freedom laws they once fought for vociferously, because they now believe the freedom to practice one’s religion amounts to nothing more than a freedom to discriminate.

In such context, there is a very pressing need for all who believe in civil and religious liberty, despite their disagreements about marriage, to unite against the civil liberty hypocrites and the cultural and corporate elite in defense of our First Amendment freedoms. Gay marriage does not require the use and abuse of government power to trample our right to speak, associate, and practice our religion, but the aims of the secular left and the victim-hunting social justice warriors do require such overreach. These rights are essential. They are what makes us America. And they deserve defending by all who believe in the freedom to think, associate, speak, and believe.

***

LGBT activists and their fellow travelers really will be coming after social conservatives. The Supreme Court has now, in constitutional doctrine, said that homosexuality is equivalent to race. The next goal of activists will be a long-term campaign to remove tax-exempt status from dissenting religious institutions. The more immediate goal will be the shunning and persecution of dissenters within civil society. After today, all religious conservatives are Brendan Eich, the former CEO of Mozilla who was chased out of that company for supporting California’s Proposition 8.

In that sense, social and religious conservatives must recognize that the Obergefell decision did not come from nowhere. It is the logical result of the Sexual Revolution, which valorized erotic liberty. It has been widely and correctly observed that heterosexuals began to devalue marriage long before same-sex marriage became an issue. The individualism at the heart of contemporary American culture is at the core of Obergefell — and at the core of modern American life.

This is profoundly incompatible with orthodox Christianity. But this is the world we live in today.

And the same is true of marriage itself. America is not quite so “advanced” as certain European societies, but our marriage rate is at historic lows, with the millennial generation, the vanguard of support for same-sex marriage, leading the retreat. Millennials may agree with Kennedy’s ruling, but they’re making his view of marriage as “a keystone of the nation’s social order” look antique. In their views and (lack of) vows, they’re taking a more relaxed perspective, in which wedlock is malleable and optional, one way among many to love, live, rear kids — or not…

Too many Americans clearly just like the more relaxed view of marriage’s importance, and the fact that this relaxation makes room for our gay friends and neighbors is only part of its appeal. Straight America has its own reasons for seeking liberation from the old rules, its own hopes of joy and happiness to chase…

The case for same-sex marriage has been pressed in the name of the Future. But the vision of marriage and family that made its victory possible is deeply present-oriented, rejecting not only lessons of a long human past but also many of the moral claims that inspire adults to privilege the interests of their children, or indeed to bring children into existence at all.

***

The shift in opinion has had many causes. Some of it has taken place household by household and neighborhood by neighborhood; voters are considerably more likely to support same-sex marriage if they know a gay or lesbian person personally. Meanwhile, gay characters are now much more common, and are portrayed far more positively, on television and in the movies. The hard work of thought leaders like Sullivan (who is a friend of mine) and activists like Evan Wolfson has helped to catalyze the process…

In the United States, gay marriage has gone from unthinkable to the law of the land in just a couple of decades. Homosexuality has gone from “the love that dare not speak its name” — something that could get you locked up, beat up, ostracized or killed, as is still the case in much of the world — into something that’s out-and-proud, so to speak.

In my view, of course, Americans have gotten the question of gay marriage right. So I’ll be among the 60 percent celebrating the decision tonight.